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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: North American Waterfowl Management Plan (Part 2 of 2)
Date of Interview: January 10, 2006
Location of Interview:
Mediator for First Panel: Bob Streeter
Mediator for Second Panel: Dave Sharp
First Panel Consists of: Red Hunt, Harvey Nelson, Rollie Sparrow, Dick Hopper, and George Finney
Second Panel Consists of: Ken Rick, Bob Streeter, Harvey Nelson, Jim McQuaig, and John Cornely
Most Important Projects: North American Waterfowl Management Plan
Brief Summary of first panel: Talks about the concept of forming a plan and early implementation to about 1987. Talks about it taking shape in he 1984, 1985 time period. Had meeting at Remington Farm in Maryland. Knew it had to be an international plan. Talked about writing the plan, negotiations between the U.S. and Canada about what to include in the plan. How to get money into Canada to help them implement the plan. Talked about the need for partnerships, the importance of farm policies in both countries and prioritizing the issues. Coining the Joint Venture concept, establishing the first designated areas in the U.S. and Canada. Wanted to take a responsible approach to achieve goals. Had people responsible for editing the first plan and had a oversight committee that was “keeper” of the plan.
Brief Summary of second panel: Started with time period 1987 and went to around 1990. Talked about Joint Venture Management Boards, the North American Wetland Conservation Act with getting money to Canada and Mexico. Getting Mexico signed on with the North American Plan. Talked about the logo and how it picked by Harvey and Jim. Talked about partnerships and how people worked together to get the job done, addressing the communications issues also to help get people on the same page. Had an awards program to recognize people or groups that did a good job. Talked about other supporters, such as other government agencies. Wanting to recognize others who worked in the background to help get this done. 2
KEY:
BS
Bob Streeter
RS
Rollie Sparrow
RH
Red Hunt
DH
Dick Hopper
HN
Harvey Nelson
GF
George Finney
*not sure who is talking or if particular person marked as talking is correct
My name is Bob Streeter. I’m a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee. I had the opportunity to work the North American Waterfowl Management Plan in a couple of capacities and help implement the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. We have a panel here today that’s going to be talking about the period from when the plan, North American Waterfowl Management Plan, uh concept had been basically agreed upon and then during the writing the period until it’s early implementation. Until this document here, that we call the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, it was signed in May of 1986, became a document that brought a lot of partners to the table to protect wildlife habitat across the continent. And the people I have with me here today are (unclear) group. First of all I like to introduce Red Hunt, Red is from California and he was on the Waterfowl uh from the state of California waterfowl programs for years and became active in the early days of the North American Plan and has continued as a retiree to represent California on the North American Waterfowl Management Plan Committee and the council staff for the North American Wetlands Conservation Council. Next to Red is Harvey Nelson; Harvey has been involved in the North American Plan also from before it was even conceived. He’s worked with waterfowl, waterfowl research, management and was active in the development of the Plan; was the first director of the U.S. office that implemented the Plan and is still, in his retirement years, still active in waterfowl issues. Rollie Sparrowe, Dr. Rollie Sparrowe, who was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Migratory Bird Management Office, he was one of the first technical uh persons working with the North American Plan; continued on as Deputy Assistant Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and then with the Wildlife Management Institute. Rollie is now retired and, but continues in his conservation work uh nation wide and well as locally in Wyoming, where he lives. Next gentlemen is Dick Hopper, state of Colorado, Dick is a waterfowl researcher, waterfowl biologist in Colorado and was has been active in the early days of the North American Plan Committee and has uh continued with his interests 3
in this area. And finally the last member is our partner from Canada, Dr. George Finney. George was with the Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada and uh is now with a group called Bird…
GF: Bird Studies Canada.
BS: Bird Studies Canada and uh is a non-government organization, in Canada. These gentlemen will uh will be discussing and debating and uh pulling some the background out of their, their heads, what they remember in terms of the meetings they were at; who was there, who did what and try, we’re going to try and take this period from about 1984, when there was a meeting in Remington Farms uh Maryland, where there was a group of biologists and administrators from Canada, from the U.S. that came to an agreement that there had to be international plan and the North American Waterfowl Management Plan that would incorporate all of the other mini plans that had been worked on for several years going back some of them back to the 1950’s. This North American Plan would take shape in the period of 1984, 1985, negotiations to get it approved in Canada, the U.S. thru the ’85 to the signing in ’86, and then we’ll talk a little bit about, go into the first maybe the first year of the Plan Committee uh establishment and how they emerged to govern the North American Waterfowl Management Plan as it actually started being delivered in the ground. So lets go back to Remington Farms, 1984, and Harvey I think you were at that meeting, can you then summarize what you thought was the result, the summary of that meeting, what came out of it in terms of agreements between the Canadian and U.S. personal that were there.
HN: Well, may have to back up just a bit cuz there were a lot of people at that meeting. Uh I was in an administrative capacity and uh didn’t really participate in the full meeting, but uh this was the acumination of a lot of earlier attempts to get some agreement in principle about developing an international plan, something that would oversee the two national plans that had been developed or in a process of being developed and try to focus on the real needs at the moment. And uh that, the negotiating committee uh…also was there the drafting of the plan and uh others around this table today were involved more directly in the drafting process and the other negotiations that followed. But I think one of the other important things we talked about in a different panel, was that uh at that stage, just prior to that meeting, there had been a gathering of some of the key 4
administrators in Canada and the United States and it was important to get those key people around the table and get a common agreement on this is the way to go and this will indeed be an international plan and then there was concern as to whether or not it needed to be a treaty or not, we talked about that in earlier session. And the ultimate outcome of all that discussion was that, let’s make it an international agreement; doesn’t have to go thru all the state department approval and similar approval in Canada and that’s what led then to the, the uh negotiating committee that was present, the members that were present, of which a number became part of the drafting committee. And uh perhaps Rollie or others that were more actively involved in the drafting committee could speak to that part of it.
BS: Before we go to that Harvey, could you dredge up and names of any of the people that may have been at that meeting at Washington between Canadian folks and the U.S. folks? Was it at Secretary of Interior level, was it the Directors of the Fish and Wildlife, Canadian Wildlife Service, do you recall any particulars on that? I know you weren’t directly involved in that but do remember any of those?
HN: Well, my understanding was it was strictly and informal uh meeting to be sure that everybody in the administrative position or responsibility to help make those decisions, was present and a chance to offer their final comments and agree in principle that this was the way to go. So there be no further debate or misunderstanding later and then they also had to make some decision about uh whether or not it was to be a treaty or an amendment to a treaty or call it a general, or just a international agreement; which it turned out to be.
BS: Ok.
HN: Uh there were a number of people at a meeting at Washington and uh…you know I can remember some of them but I’m reluctant to try and name all of them, I might miss some.
BS: Ok, thanks. Well we had a letter that came in from Dick Yancey, from Louisiana, he was a member of that first negotiating committee and he gave us a list of from Canada there was Douglas Rosenburogh from Toronto, who was a Canadian uh…
GF: He was the uh…
BS: Canadian Wildlife Service or… 5
GF: No he was Ontario Providential Director.
BS: Ok, and uh Bob Andrews, who’s Director of Wildlife from Edmonton from Alberta.
GF: Yea, right.
BS: Uh George, Dr. Finney was on that committee and represented Canadian Wildlife Service. From the Untied States, it was Don Minnich who was a… Associate Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service at that time for refuges and wildlife…
[Someone saying Deputy]
BS: deputy. Dr. John Rogers, who was the uh… Migratory Bird Management Office at that time. Uh Jack Grebe was a Fish and Wildlife Service consultant. He was a former Director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife but he was hired as a former, as a consultant there as experienced in waterfowl. Kevin Lloyd, from North West territories. Dr. Bob Bailey, was a Canadian Wildlife Service uh kind of a counter part, I believe, to John Rogers the technical uh…
GF: no Jake Grebe, he was our writer.
BS: No, uh Bob Bailey.
GF: Bob Bailey was our writer.
BS: He was your writer, ok.
GF: Jim Patterson…
BS: Jim Patterson was there…
GF: was the counterpart.
BS: then Dr. Jim Patterson was the next one and Rollie, you were there. And uh, then it says (unclear) Dick Yancey. So that was the first negotiating committee, did that, the composition of this committee change over the next year while this uh, first draft was occurring?
GF: No, (unclear) Wallen took over from John Rogers when he moved to Alaska. Um and that’s when Don Minnich came on.
*RS: And Don Minnich came on. They had that Remington Farms meeting um, I think there may have been another person or two there, but what you’re describing is the actually steering company that set about writing the plan. And at that point I took John Rogers job and he went to Alaska and I think it stayed pretty stable through, certainly to the first draft the next spring. 6
BS: And the people who actually did the writing, was Bob Bailey and Jack Grebe. How did that come about?
*RS: When we met as a group, we took a shot at writing some parts of it and negotiating some parts of it and suggesting exact wording and then when we were done with each meeting, those two guys were charged with putting the pieces together and putting it in uh written format and then it would come back to us for review prior to the next meeting.
GF: The uh, the first meeting at Remington Farms, from my recollection, was um we had had discussions back and forth between principally the Migratory Bird Offices and CWS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But it was the first time that we came forward with essentially an agenda on each side of the issue, about what we felt needed to be in the plan. Uh what was important to us and so we can, from the Canadian side we came forward with a proposition about widespread habitat protection plan; that did require funding from the United States in order to help us out. Um, we didn’t know going into that meeting whether that would even be acceptable as a proposition in the States. We similarly were there talking about how we were going to handle issues related to trying… to calm down the regulatory process. Um, were talking about substance harvesting issues and other issues like that. So as I recollect, Rollien, the principal meeting or the principal meetings were sorting out whether we, our agenda was common enough that we could actually proceed. And in reviewing my notes, (unclear) as I got back from that meeting, my basic conclusion was that the hard work had been done with getting through the providences and then, in fact, the agenda between the Canada and the United States was very very similar; and that the principals that we and the main items were larger in accordance and that didn’t mean there weren’t other important issues around, but we felt confident enough coming out of the initial meeting to really put our foot down on the accelerator. And we got through, I think, in four meetings or perhaps five we got through negotiating the first draft and in uh something like seven months, which was quite remarkable when you think about.
*RS: It was, and we directly confronted such issues as what did we need to know that we didn’t have in hand and we would then charge often our Migratory Bird Office, and I’d go back to the staff and hand them the request for the data that we thought we needed to illustrate things down the road for the to continue the writing and of course the writing 7
itself, any time something went down on a piece of paper, a lot of people had a kind of network wanting to see this, even though there wasn’t direct public involvement in this there was a lot of networking out thru the councils to the states and the providences and so there was input from a lot of people who were never there.
*GF: And one of the most important things I think that we concluded at that session was that we weren’t going to try to drive this as solely as government programming, that our non-government partners uh such as Ducks Unlimited and Wildlife Habitat Canada and others which emerged uh would be, could be and would be featured as the delivers of the program. Which may, which confirmed the fact we needed to develop a very broad, basic partnership in order to deliver the program and really sent a challenge out in front of us; not that some partnerships didn’t already exist but uh it… we really did come to the conclusion that government agencies themselves couldn’t themselves couldn’t deliver this program; it was too ambitious.
*RS: One strong focus that we identified in those very first meetings was the importance of farm policies in both countries and we had had a, I think, had had a bit of a jump ahead of Canada in working directly with our farm bill, it’s a different kind of system, but that did indeed become right from the start a major focus on how to deliver changes on the landscape.
BS: Wasn’t there recognition early on that this plan could not be one strictly acquisition, that that’s why it had to move out with private lands, work with Ag. Programs, other government entities, try to get everyone stirring towards the same end point?
*RS: Well as George described in those first four, five meetings, we talked about things like those kinds of strategies uh and we knew very well that a whole bunch of it, acquisition, wouldn’t be compatible in either country with politics and economics and a lot of realities and so we were focusing on what became an important principal out of the plan was learning to use other people’s money and other programs, like agriculture, that we’d only partially been connected to, where it wasn’t money given in the name of wildlife but we could work within those programs to make outcomes on the landscape that got done what we thought needed to get done. So, we had a lot of pretty fundamental discussion. Another one that hasn’t been mentioned, was vitally important, is the American team rather readily accepted uh that the mandate to deliver would be 8
larger in terms of dollars in the U.S. because with more people and uh a more of a interest in harvest and recreational utilization of the birds, when they came down into the United States, that we would have to find a way to send resources to Canada where the habitat was to get the job done. And that was a pretty fundamental agreement that we came up to quite early.
*GF: There was also, in the process, forces at work that which were trying to prioritize the, where we would put or programs and one of the things we came…uh we came to the conclusion that if we’re going to have a broad enough political constituency in order to sell this program at the magnitude that we needed to sell it, that we need to have a… we needed to have a truly uh national program that contemplated programming from coast to coast and from south to north. What else was I recollect had to deal with some rather silly issues, there was a proposition on the table at one point that mergansers not be considered waterfowl and be excluded from the plan (everyone kind of laughing/chuckling) because it didn’t taste very good. But then again we concluded that uh…that probably wasn’t a really good long-term strategy (everyone kind of laughing).
* HN: You know another important dimension of that meeting and one of the outcomes was the renewed emphasis on the importance of private lands. And it dub tails with the, what’s been said about the, need all the cooperatees you can get and you had to recognized that a lot of the habitat out there that people were talking about existed on private lands and there have to be some mechanisms developed to provide enough incentives to private land owners to be willing to participate.
*DH: I think these were all the things that were talked and considered (unclear, a noise disrupting tape) Venture. Uh the concept of Joint Venture would, you know, we recognize that uh this focus of this plan was waterfowl but at the same time we knew well enough that there are many other migratory birds uh that utilize these wetlands and associated uplands as well as what 250 species of rare and endangered birds. And uh, not to mention mammals, that sort of thing so I think it was an effort to uh, to try to uh gain all those interests that we could at the grass roots level so that everybody had an ownership in it and were more willing to contribute uh, deliver the funds that uh were available to us. 9
BS: I might be putting you on the spot a little bit here but uh, Red and Dick, would you address from the state prospective and maybe the international’s prospective, what was the climate going into these discussions in terms of the creative tension between the states and the federal government in the U.S. and where you might want to address this a little bit?
RH: Yes, it uh, I think there was a great learning process in participating in the North American as far as the states were concerned. Uh, within the states there were a certain amount of parochialism uh between the states there was a little bit of jealously, between the Flyways there was quite a bit of jealously and between the states and the federal there was even more. And what we had to learn right away is that by working together we could get the job done and if you just wanted to take the short route, or so to speak, it wouldn’t happen so that was the biggest change. And the other one that was apparent to us is that we saw the need to get something done in Canada right away and the overriding thing we first got started was someway to expand on what DU had been doing in the prairie providences in Canada and really get out the habitat thing, so we went out and beat the drums to get all the support we could for getting U.S. dollars into Canada.
DH: Yea I think the bottom line was that uh, the flyways recognized the, that something needed to be done habitat wise. We were in a bad situation there for a number of years and uh, so it was I think it was easy for the Flyways to overlook some of the internal squabbles that might have been apparent to us. In recognizing then that uh we needed to focus our efforts, especially in the production areas, and that was basically Canada and uh…the Flyways, I really believed, welcomed the implementation of the plan.
BS: Rollie did you want to comment on that?
RS: Interesting to mention is keep in mind the timing of this. While the plan was being written, people like me in my role of the Fish and Wildlife Service came forward and proposed to the states 25% reduction in waterfowl harvest nationally and had some pretty tumultuous years in our actions that I personally feel that the fact that we were simultaneously building this other goal and working toward it, and it came out right then, probably saved us from going further in the acrimony and the disagreements because we all had begun to fix on this plan and the habitat base as a way out of this dilemma.
BS: George, you didn’t face any of those issues in Canada did you? 10
[Everyone laughing]
GF: Yes we did, we had our fair share. Um and dealing with um… uh harvesting the plan was one of the most difficult areas that we had given the fact that we were trying to, as I said earlier, calm down the amount of time that we were spending on the allocation and regulation decisions. Um and I think we came up with a formula that ultimately worked quite well. We also set aside some other issues that uh, for other fora, mostly notably I think is substance harvesting issue, which was not really resolved until the protocol to amend the Migratory Bird Convention Act in 19 uh, 1994 I believe. And there were some issues that we just didn’t have the technical knowledge to know really what to do about; um, so we set up some species Joint Ventures, which were basically science Joint Ventures. And uh for one group of birds, the sea ducks, at the time we recognized that there were important issues there but we really didn’t have the information in front of us so it took another 10 to 15 years until the Sea Duck Joint Venture was born and I think that was really picking up unfinished business from 1985. And that brought in, in a real way, Alaska and Labrador and the North West territories into the frame work of the plan and to a degree they felt um, they felt that their issues weren’t being addressed until that was done, so. The plan is a continually involving issue, as everyone knows. We did a lot of work in ’84 and ’85 but we didn’t get it all done.
BS: Dick you and George both mention Joint Venture, as a little side trip here, when did you, when did any of you first recall the term Joint Venture being coined and applied?
[Someone saying Rollie]
RS: Well I think the Canadian contingent put it forward at our first plan meeting. I don’t recall whether it was actively discussed at the Remington Farms thing, but I think it was when we were in a more intimate setting with those state people or whatever it was that wrote the plan and I can remember uh you, George and Bob Andrews both explaining your concept of a Joint Venture that had been, I don’t know whether it had came from some other business attempt or other kind of stuff; but it seemed to just click with people as a natural, right from beginning. I will say that I’m not sure if Joint Ventures went about it the way we all expected the first time we talked about it, they found different ways to get it done but uh… 11
DH: Well I think the fact that…that we had already developed…the 34 designated areas as priority areas, to get a better handle and being able to massage those areas better, it’s…logical to put in to some kind of package so that they would…so that we could basically handle them.
RS: We…haven’t talked about that much but there is a map in that first plan, with those geographic areas mapped, and that was a really important step, when we defined on a geographical basis what the areas looked like to us and kind of tried to prioritize where we were going to go; that was a big jump, some people didn’t like it because their favorite area wasn’t as high a priority, but it was a mechanism by which we move forward, it was vastly important.
HN: And it also served as the basis for selecting the first five in the U.S. and the first two in Canada, but getting back to the terminology, I spoke (unclear, someone clearing throat) in the interview yesterday. And my recollection is that…I think we had a program review committee in Ottawa and there were a few of us present at that and uh at dinner that night the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Director General of the Canadian Wildlife Service and some of us that were at the table talked about this further, and “How are we going to get all this done? There must be some mechanisms that we can adopt that’ll help us” and somebody said “Oh, the first think we should do is adopt a Joint Venture principal, it’s working in industry, working in the corporate world. Why wouldn’t it work for this?”
GF: The main differenc, of course, is we needed to avoid a setting up independent cooperations, so we wanted to find a way of establishing a partnership without establishing all of the legal liabilities and stuff around, not for profit cooperations, all over the place cuz none of us could imagine doing that so, we came up with the Joint Venture mechanism, which seems to have worked based on what’s happened in the last 20 years.
HN: …It worked because it became a ground project level application (unclear) implementation process. All of the interested stake holders were invited to the table and they could bring to the table what they were able and little by little it began to develop the framework for a given Joint Venture and including the funding (unclear).12
BS: Now let’s talk about the biology for just a minute, as the planned evolved that, the first year from ’84 to ’85 the first writing in seven months, what discussion was held regarding the population goals; breeding population verses fall flight, were there any discussions as to which is the best (unclear) as a goal for the North American Plan?
RS: Well, yes there were uh you recall that we decided early on that the existence of all of the species plans and Flyways plans and other things was an existing framework that we shouldn’t try to duplicate. And so when we charged the technical folks, in then my office, the Migratory Bird Office, to come back to us with the specifics, with the list of species and all of these things. We charged them to adopt whatever the goals were in active species plans and…we had just pick something that was convenient and recognizable and that’s where our beginning lists came from.
RH: (Unclear) if I remember, primarily focused on geese as opposed to ducks, ducks came a little harder and a little later, mallard I guess was the first one that really got the treatment that all the ducks deserved.
BS: Mention again, as we did in one of the other interview processes, what was the connection with the population goals and habitat goals…how did the habitat goals…
RS: We…
BS: …come forward?
RS: We asked for input from the technical staff and both Canadian and U.S. and state people all wrestled with that. It was primarily the federal folks making this first cut to advise us and then was reviewed later. And it wasn’t an attempt to be precise, it was an attempt to make a judgment based on what we knew about habitat, which was pretty general…and put that out as a benchmark to try to sustain those population levels from the 1970’s, which we had somewhat arbitrary chosen as a kind of gold standard; if we can get back to this level and sustain it, this would be a good thing. It’s really just about as fundamental as that. And there was some really interesting little sidelights, I can remember Bob Andrews saying, “Well you know, if you only had 50,000 mallards left and they concentrated in few areas, people could go see all the mallards they ever needed to see, but what we’re really trying to do here is sustain the kind of waterfowl use, hunting and recreation that we have dispersed across the landscape. So we gotta bigger job to do because we wanna try and reach those loftier goals.” 13
DH: I think, yea the ‘70’s…was the goal for…reaching the objective in waterfowl numbers and the problem then is how do you relate that back to what was present in terms of habitat and we just didn’t have as big of handle on that as we would have liked, but as Rollie says you have to start some where.
RS: And we talked openly about the fact that…a responsible goal to satisfy an interested public, was basically to try…not to just reach a certain level but to dampen the amplitude that we knew would come; we acknowledged openly that ducks would still rise and fall affected by climate and things like that we’re never be able to control and so we had to set some goals but have a realistic expectation of what that would mean.
BS: And if we were to accomplish those acre goals that would keep that amplitude within a reasonable
RS: Right.
BS: …level of fluctuation.
RS: Right.
HN: Like you said it had to be in a reasonable approach, a reasonable perspective, one you could support based on what was known. But with looking back now, uh seems to me you know that was one of the real fortuitous events as the plan was developed; was establishing those population goals. And for the ones that they could do the best job with, because today they still serve as a benchmark for where things are headed, what we should be doing.
BS: So the final, the first basic final draft came out in, according to Dick Yancey, in June of 1985, went our for review and comment and I’m sure that there was a lot of comments; do you know, remember what time the a final draft of that was then sent up to powers that be in the Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada and in the Department of Interior for it to get the higher level blessings? Do you recall any…was that an easy process or did that just, they took the technicians word for it and stamped it?
GF: Uh…it’s called the final… the final….negotiations were in February of 1985 as I recollect, prior to the consultation document going…
RS: ’86.
GF: No…’85…’85 was when we had our meeting, first meeting in Indigo Island and got a document ready to go out to the public, in both Canada and the United States, for 14
consultations. Um. in June…probably a good date for when it actually hit the street. We knew at that time that we had problems in certain areas, already. I recollect, for example, that Ducks Unlimited, Incorporated was not happy with some of the…some of the elements of the plan. I think in part because of a misunderstanding that governments would try to take over land management issues, which is in their area, and there was also some concerns about the wording regarding harvest. So I remember Jim Patterson and others going down to Louisiana to meet some people from Ducks Unlimited, Inc. to talk about that. And we talked with various NGO’s and the interests Ag. Departments in some of the providences…viewed prairie ducks as being flying rats that ate grain and were of no use to anything, so that felt that if we were going to launch a program to increase the number of flying rats, that we needed to have compensation built right into the plan. Um and this went up to higher levels of government, so uh in the case of, coming up with a…set of comments that we could take back to the U.S. I don’t think that the process, or the difficulties mostly within the bureaucracy of Environment Canada, it was dealing with the (unclear) of Canadian interests that felt that this plan was going to affect them. And ultimately we went back with a small list of issues to Indigo Island again in 1986, which included familiar issues now, there was feeling that we were way too ambitious; particularity with respect to the money. Um we explicitly got from our northern constitutes the fact that we not done very well with sea ducks, um there was those people that felt we dealt with too much harvest and those that felt that we didn’t do enough with harvest. But by 1986 we were able to…we had a package of comments that we ready to go back and talk to the U.S. one more time about.
HN: And to add to that, it’s my recollection that you know as this was surfaced through the different levels of the Fish and Wildlife Service, through the regions and other interested groups; …we had a directorate meeting, I believe it was in like maybe January early February of ’86 where the final copy supposedly was circulated and I remember the Director at that stage saying “ This looks like the final document gentlemen, speak now or forever hold your peace, cuz this is going to go forward.” And I suspected it was also on the agenda at the International Meeting and the council meetings that uh the North American…
GF: (unclear) yea in ’85 for sure it was. 15
RS: That was in fact there was meetings each year at the Internationals meeting where, as I recall, Ron Lambertson spoke for the Service about the progress and the rest of if and kind of put it in front of the Executive Committee of International and asked them to take this very seriously because we were at decision points and all of that.
DH: Ready for signature.
RS: And I think George is right in talking about the changes that were made in ’85 gradually after we had the first draft out on the streets, things we had talked about but not yet confronted the issue of the need for Canadians to be able to offer compensation to farmers because that was a hot political issue and they were very clear about that too (unclear) I don’t think. You know we worked through a number of those kinds of things with this feedback to try to keep the core of this together and go ahead. The part that I recall, very strongly, is when the plan was signed in ’86 in May, there was a period between that February time when there as open discussion and the May signing where issues between the countries of a political nature came up and it was sort of, it got up into a realm that was beyond normal resource management channels, there were serious questions that came up from the Interior Department and from our Congressional Appropriators about “where do you think you’re going to get their money, this money and how could you sign a document that we interpret as saying, committing to expenditures before they’re appropriated”; and so subsequent negotiations had to occur where Susan Lambson, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary under Bill Horn, who was the Assistant Secretary at that in Interior, uh went to Canada with…Jack, the international president, Jack Barrymen, and they went thru this thing line by line and they were, Susan of course was instructed which words had to come out, which phrases had to come out that indicated a commented of money that wasn’t there and that kind stuff and there was some fairly difficult negotiations that had dragged on for weeks and people became pretty exasperated down at the working level and were ready to say “the hell with this thing, if the politicians won’t let us do this, then we’re not going to do it” but they stuck to it and they made the compromises and everybody swallowed hard and excepted them because they really didn’t (unclear) until the effect of what we were laying out as trying to do.
GF: I remember the day that we got notification that your management board was not happy with the techs because the way it was, the way it came to us is we receive the 16
galilees for the print and they amendments were in there and we hadn’t been notified that (unclear, laughing), we discovered them as we went though the galilees. I still remember Jim Patterson going up and down the walls.
BS: So it got to the point where it was accepted in, by parties in both sides, you mentioned DU one time, that there was some consultation with DU. At what point did the negotiating committee bring in the interest of the many NGO’s that are now supporting the plan? Was DU the only NGO or were there others that were consulted and…
RS: Well my recollection is that came about more informally through…Jack Grebe and Dick Yancey and through some outreach, it wasn’t just to the states uh Keith Harmon at the Wildlife Management Institute was involved in tracking this as it went along and had a (unclear) of people he talked to. The DU issue came up and George I can’t recall whether it was after the first draft was public in ’85 or it was actually after it was signed in ’86.
GF: It was ’85 I think.
RS: Well…
GF: I can remember May…
RS: I can’t recall who went but I was involved and I went to the Chicago airport and we met Peter Coors, who was president of DU, and the fundamental concern they were bringing to us then, and this is why I think could be a separate meeting than one you’re talking about; the fundamental concern was not harvest issues, it wasn’t anything but money. And they had interpreted the plan laying out all these goals with some dollar figures that were large and all that, as a suggestion that they, DU, should give their money to a government body to make decisions about where it went and as soon as we established that that was their concern we were able very quickly to say, “no that’s not the case, what we’ve tried to do is have the technical people from both countries set out objectives and goals and we’re going to try and find ways to jointly work to achieve those.” And they said literally “Oh you mean you don’t expect us to give our control over our money to the government” and we said “absolutely not.” And it was kind of like somebody pulled a light bulb and all of a sudden it was more positive. 17
*DH or RH: And uh I think that was where Joint Ventures came in, is these various partners, these NGO’s…at whatever level, begin to migrate towards those Joint Ventures and pretty soon they were motivated and they could see what the benefits would be to that collectively they could do a much better job than one individual by themselves.
HN: But that part of the sales package we had to develop in the implementation process.
[Various members of panel agreeing by saying “yea”]
BS: So (unclear of name hear) from Secretary of Interior in the Fish and Wild, in U.S. and Tom McMillan was the Minister of Environment in Canada, did they sign this in a big ceremony or was this done just you know kind of through their offices and…
RS: No it, well they were both in the Interior Department at one time cuz I stood there and watched them sign the documents and I don’t know whether we had a related signing in Canada.
GF: I think it was just (unclear, talking at same time).
RS: Maybe it was just this one and you know it was signed as a firm agreement between, not the two governments as much as the two secretarial levels who had charge over natural resources for their government as, I think people interpret it as a statement of intent, to go do this together, not a treaty, not a law and technically not bonding other than by the good will between these two entities. In other words they accepted the responsibility and signed off on it.
BS: And looking through documentation, the next thing I noticed was a, I believe an August meeting at Remington Farms, of the Plan Committee. And so in between the May and July or August of that summer, apparently the international appointed members for the Plan Committee, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Canadian Wildlife, the Providences and yaw came together for the first meeting; uh it was chaired by, I believe it was Walt Stieglitz, who was at that time…was the Associate Director in Washington, and um Don Minnich, who was at that meeting, um Red I think you were there.
RH: Yes.
BS: Dick, I think you were there.
DH: Right.
BS: George…
GF: No I wasn’t. 18
BS: You were not there.
GF: I was reprieved.
BS: Okay. Jim Patterson, Bob Bailey, trying to think of the other names.
HN: I was, was…
BS: Bob Andrews, Dennis Surratt, Berry Meadows I think was there from…
RH: New Brunswick.
BS: New Brunswick.
RS: And that was a… I think that’s important thing, we were talking about that over lunch, um…the fact that a deliberate choice was made to form a plan, oversight committee that would be viewed as the keeper of the plan itself; that statement of goals and objectives and measures of how much achievement we’re making towards these goals and objectives, and involve only the state, federal and providential agencies in the two countries that had regulatory and management responsibility for those resources. That the plan committee itself was not viewed as the public form through which all interest would be…would be served. And that was different than the way lots of committees had been formed in other contexts and it seems to have worked. Now the…the second committee that was envisioned was an implementation body between the countries, which would be where the private interests came into it and an attempt was made to join forces to get things done to move the plan ahead.
BS: So if you were to look at 1986 and early ’87, the first two, three meetings of the North American Plan Committee, what kind of progress occurred during that time? What, what was it all administrative, was it looking at how you get the Joint Ventures running, what kind of things came up at those meetings? George,..kick that off.
GF: Well I think the next important meeting was actually in September, at the international, where the plan was essentially now in the market place and…and international…Gary Myers was the president, as I recollect, of the International that year and he and a number of other people were very enthusiastic about this fact that this new plan had come…into being and it started to be a talk at that meeting of first step projects; and I don’t know whether the first step project idea came at your earlier plan committee, but it certainly was on the floor…
[Someone in background saying “at the international”] 19
GF: of the international as being, essentially a way to pilot the notion of getting…getting money to…Canada as flag ships projects but also into the states and so that the, the outcome of the plan would become immediately visible. And I think that, that was really key because that was the step that turned…well we went from the plan uh planning mode to implementation mode. And, if you think of it, it was a very fast transition and that transition I think established some momentum and laid the groundwork for what was to come in the next critical three or four years.
RH: And I think there was a mad hawk committee of international (unclear) North American Plan implementation at that time, and as you pointed out, the main thrust of that was the get the dollars flowing and get things on the ground so they could demonstrate that the thing is really going to work.
RS: We had some obstacles to overcome immediately that come up in mild discussion during the writing of the plan, but as soon we started talking about the very specific issue of using U.S. dollars from whatever source, in Canada on the ground, we had people in the Congress uh appropriators, particularly in their staffs, we had folks on the subsequently the…National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which was newly formed, took some steps and became a real force in both advancing it’s own cause and getting us started because they were free as a small cooperate entity to take the money and spend it in Canada. But…I’m trying to remember your Reno based gentlemen who was on the board and who owned a piece of one the California duck clubs and some of these guys were our friends in waterfowl management, but they were pretty particular about the bean counting in this whole thing. They wanted to know who was going guarantee and how are they going to guarantee the U.S. interests and how the money was used and tracked and that we really got the benefit from it. And that was put up as almost an insurmountable obstacle, at first, and had to be overcome; that’s why this chapter that unfolds with the foundation and with states going to get some money because everyone reasoned if we can’t just ask for money, we gotta show that we’re willing to put some forward and the states, that’s when they stepped forward with their first step program.
HN: And it was kind of a transition period too, you know once the plan was signed and everybody was anxious to move into implementation and to spend the first dollars and I recall and I didn’t get into the Directorship of it until ’87, but during that period…there 20
were different kinds of meetings but you know again Chip Collins was the Executive Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and it’s true he spent a lot time trying to help orchestrate the best steps forward and to provide initial funding. And there are a number of people like that across the country that helped us and some point they all outta be recognized.
RS: Yea people behind the scenes, Jim Range was involved in getting Senator Bob Caston to get some money earmarked from an usual source, some sort of international funding base, that allowed that first step to be taken to spend money in Canada and that was done through the foundation and then quickly after that the first step stuff involving state money than subsequently matched by Ducks Unlimited, you know became more complex; but all this was an effort to show good will and begin move money in the right direction and show that we could prepare for its, its tracking and use and accounting.
RH: It led up to the passage of the act too, which really made the…funneling of U.S. dollars into Canada a little more uh…
*BS: If you look at the track record in terms of the plan committee minutes, in ’86 and ’87, there really not much actually happening in terms of on the ground or money that was flowing etcetera, but there had to be a tremendous amount of talking behind the scene, because these, the laws that led up to the act led up to the…Senator Mitchell and when he got the, foundation was allowed put money in internationally; that all had to take many, many months probably the ’86, ’87, I don’t know if I’ll be able (unclear) all that information out but I agree it would be great to be able to find the names of everybody that had some part in making that happen.
*DH: And a lot of this was organizational effort too, (unclear) it had to be. And I don’t believe the North American Plan Committee really settled into its true role until about the late ’87, ’88 and the members might have changed a bit and became firm but there were six members on each side, from each country and…finally that settled into place and they scheduled regular meetings and…
BS: Well this basically, I think maybe, brings us up to the end of this session, which is late ’87, when there was a decision made that there will be a U.S. Office to mange the plan, there will be a Canadian Office to manage the plan. I believe Canada, George, 21
came up with money dedicated to Joint Venture and that was maybe about eighty, late ’87.
GF: Probably ’88 but Jim (unclear, talking at same time) will be able to speak to that more accurately
BS: And…so I think we’re at a point where we can call this panel to a halt and reorganize for taking it from roughly late ’87 thru ’88 through ’90 where they’re just everyday there seemed to be more and more happening. But, uh if we can think about this a little bit more and try to pull in other names of other people and maybe eventually pass this out for others to review, we can complete the full picture of some of this; I’ll say it a little bit fuzzy at this point, of who did what, when. But we know there were a lot of people involved, joining in, in partnerships; they believed in the basic goals, the vision of the North American Plan and I think it had a solid, solid start with the works you folks and your partners did during this period. Thank you very much.
[Causal talk, someone said “This is the model for the award, for the Canvas Back Award” 22
Key:
DS
Dave Sharp
BS
Bob Streeter
KR
Ken Rick
JM
Jim McQuaig
HN
Harvey Nelson
JC
John Cornely
*not sure who is talking or if particular person marked as talking is correct
Ok, in this particular panel uh what we’re going to discuss is the time period from after the plan was signed by the two signator countries in 1986 leading up to the up the early days in probably 1987 or so. And we’re going to look at the period of time from then until almost when…the North American Wetland Conservation Act was signed in late in 1989 to beginning of 1990. It was an exciting time all across North America, for waterfowl, as we had a plan…we had a lot of work to do to implement the plan. It took a long time in coming but there were a lot of people ready to implement what was in place. It had a lot of supporters, it had a lot of partners, it was a massive undertaking in both countries at that time and there was a lot of communications that were going up and down, crossways uh trying to do the best job we could with implementing the plan that we had in front of us. With me I have a panel that I’d like to introduce to you. First of all Ken Rick, who worked…long time employee with the state of New York, was one of the original plan committee members; he’s here to talk about that period of time with us. Next to him is Bob Streeter, Bob Streeter…in addition to being a long time friend; Bob is also a long term Service employee. Bob and I worked, went to work in Minneapolis to work with Harvey, 1988, Bob was instrumental many phases of the plan and happy to have Bob here with us today. Next to Bob is Harvey Nelson, Harvey is probably the most long-term person that we had that we were able to draw in for some of the history; a long term Service employee, first Executive Director of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan Office in Minneapolis and I worked for Harvey in Minneapolis at that time. Next is John Cornely, who is the Chief of Migratory Birds in Denver, U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee. John was working with several of the Joint Ventures at one time, with the technical committees and implementation in the field and had been a long time worker with North American actives in Region 6 in the Fish and Wildlife Service. Next to John is Jim McQuaig, who was the…also the first Director of the Canadian implementation office in Canada, a counterpart to Harvey in terms of what was going on 23
in Canada. So that’s the panel that we have to go through this period of time. Uh I kind of like to start about the time that the U.S. and Canadian offices, for implementation of the North American Plan, were set up at the end of probably ’87 coming into ’88 when a lot of that was coming together; but I turn first to Harvey and ask Harvey, from the time that the plan was signed through ’87 and coming into 1988, what was happening within the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of administratively setting up an office for implementation and ultimately you would get that job as the Executive Director and pull together a team in Minneapolis to begin to work on the implementation phases, but what was going on in the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of getting ready to implement this North American Plan?
HN: Well very quickly, Dave, you know I was Regional Director in Minneapolis for the North Central Region at the time, and because I had long involvement in the earlier stages on the organizational development of the plan and such; I attended a lot of those meetings and sort of became a spokesperson, I guess, for the Directorate level of the Service at that time. So this is kind of a long story, but I was all set to retire in 1987 and as the plan unfolded and then implementation process came to the forefront, I agreed to stay another five years and help implement the plan. And that’s how I worked into that position, specifically, but more particularity that’s another reason why we started in Minneapolis because I was located there. And we felt that the first few years of the implementation of the new plan could be done from almost anywhere and why not do it right there. So I just moved down the hall and set up another office and hired some of you guys to come or transfer down there and things got started. But, uh, there was a big sales job, big communications job that remained to be done and we talked about that in some of the other interviews here. But those of you, who were there, including myself, spent just a lot of time, while working, traveling within the Service, within the 50 states and other areas, with the Canadians and their program, um carrying the message and trying to develop the cooperative approach that was needed. So we logged a lot of miles and a lot of time doing that and I think within the Fish and Wildlife Service as a whole, there was a new spirit developed about you know this is something we gotta see through, this is something we gotta get done and that became reflected in the early reallocation of funds, accusation funds, within the organization to divert more money into the North American 24
Plan, until there was a more secure funding base…to help look at other things that could be done on private as a supplement to help the North American Plan; so there was a lot of new things, a lot of new support developed within the Fish and Wildlife Service. And we saw the same thing happening within the states, within the four Flyway Councils and the International Association and all the other NGO’s that we worked with.
DS: Bob, at that time you were Harvey’s assistant and taken on this new job of implementation, Harvey talked about the communications aspects. What were the major jobs that we had to take on right as our office came together and to try to nurture this North American Plan into something on the ground; what were the kinds of activities that we were dealing with on a day to day basis to help us come down the road, in addition to communications, but where were we going, where did you want to go?
BS: Well I don’t think it was where we wanted to go, it’s where we had…to help the partners go with the program. Harvey was doing a yeomen’s job of getting out and…information out to people in the plan and had to help with that too. There was a need for internal communications, within the Joint Ventures and the U.S. and in Canada to let people, at the more local level, know what was going on in other places, so we had developed an internal communications program. There was an awards program that came out, early on; we needed to recognize people that did good work so that was something that we developed. We had to cheerlead to the Joint Ventures, as they were developing Joint Ventures plans, that they needed to have their goals and objectives be quantitative and even more on the ground than what the general plan was, in terms of its overall population goals and habitat goals…
[Side 1 of tape ended here, pick up on side 2]
*DS or BS: And so it was broadly communications, cheerleading, providing some level of organization, not control, but trying to work so that the Joint Ventures in Canada and the U.S. were kind of going the same path, they weren’t diverging away from the supporting the goals of the North American Plan. We developed a really close working relationship with the staff at Harvey’s office and the staff in Canada and with Joint Ventures staffs; it was a just this growing feeling of partnership and that we’re all had a greater calling to help this North American Plan through. The implementation board was an important part the first year, they were had been talked about and the NGO’s were 25
talked about in what their role in the plan was and there had to be some organization given to the, to helping the implementation board get going; and they developed I think they started with 16 NGO’s and they moved to 18 as they brought in a couple of ag. organizations. This was all during ’88 and ’89 and there was no set timeline on these, there were just so many things to do like that to provide some organization to the North American Plan implementation; the same time, trying to keep up with what was going on Joint Ventures. They were starting to put projects on the ground with various monies that were coming forward and they were building their partnerships and so we’re trying not get ahead of them but keep up with them and acknowledge all the things that were going on good in what you see in one Joint Venture, try to maybe transfer that information and idea to another Joint Venture; and I’m just not talking in the U.S. it crossed the border almost seamlessly so those are some of the things I recall that we really focused on that first, probably the first year of the office implementation.
HN: Let me add a couple of things to that, that come to mind at the moment, um first of all it was important that the Joint Venture level, and when they started the first five in the U.S. and the first two in Canada, to develop an organizational concept, at least, that would be somewhat similar; and that was the establishment of the Joint Venture management boards, so there was that similarly between them. And I think that was a real good step in the right direction early on because that built some creditability in the program and it identified some key people in the different Joint Ventures and the different states that became the leaders, so it was their program it wasn’t necessarily just our program any more. And then at the Washington level, we formed the U.S. implementation, Implementation Board, for a couple of reasons. Here we’re all working, daily, mingling with all the other NGO’s and different organizations at the Washington level, but not all was pointed in the same direction. And they weren’t all involved in the North American…the North American Waterfowl Plan support base to the same degree. So we had some discussion about that but the guys from the International (unclear), and the Wildlife Management Institute, so any way, from between Gary Myers and Larry Yawn, the late Larry Yawn, and a few other people, over coffee one day we said “We gotta organize this implementation board and get it operating because then we gotta a good reason for bringing all these folks to the same table and talk about the North 26
American Plan, not a whole bunch of other things” so we did that. And I guess I kind of headed that organization, initially, and then…Ducks Unlimited…
**Someone saying Matt Connelly**
HN: Matt Connelly from Ducks Unlimited chaired it for a couple of years. And then lets see, Rollie Sparrowe was chair for a period of time [someone speaking in background] and it eventually more less outlived its usefulness but we accomplished what we set out to do. And I think one of the major things was that we got some of the agriculture groups, on the Washington scene, more directly involved in the plan. And other organizations…it had just been peripheral until then, it turned out very strong supporters.
DS: Jim in Canada, at that time, you heard Harvey and Bob talk about some of the earlier implementation activities in the U.S. side and I assume that things were beginning to happen in Canada at the same time. What was going on at, in Canada, with implementation there, the two habitat Joint Ventures, obviously we also had two species Joint Ventures that were set up with the original signing of the plan, the black duck and the artic goose; but could you describe what was actually going on in Canada at that time and…from an implementation standpoint?
JM: Well I’ll start with the Canadian Wildlife Service; the Service had been very much focused on putting together the plan and working together with the U.S. partners to get the plan in position and also then began to focus on getting it approved through the cabinet process. And when we arrived with a signed document, we realized that our Regional Directors, who had been so strongly supportive of this whole process throughout, were now going to turn their focus into the Joint Ventures. They were going to be looking at how to put this thing on the ground and that headquarters needed to change gears and to establish, much like the U.S. office in Minneapolis at that time and then Washington, a Canadian office that basically maintained the headquarters responsibility for coordination, communications, and liaison with the United States. And so what happened first was that Jim Patterson, who is Director of the Migratory Birds branch and responsible so much as we’ve heard all day for many of the things in the development, brought in a gentlemen named Lee Munn and he came in as the coordinator of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan; there was some overlap before Jim moved on out of the Canadian Wildlife Service. Um Lee Munn then, as coordinator, 27
began to assemble a staff and I was one of the first persons that joined that staff and that goes back to a long relationship with Lee that he had been my boss in the Lands Directorate of Environment Canada. And um then Lee moved on and retired and I had the responsibility then of establishing an office, very much like Harvey and I became Harvey’s counterpart, as first of all coordinator of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan for Canada and then later on they actually held a competition, which I had to compete for and won, for the Director of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And so we then began to establish a staff the brought together communications people, brought together the various aspects of the Canadian Wildlife Service and perform the headquarters functions and very much like Bob was describing…a coordination function, making sure that the Joint Ventures were reading from the same hymn book, working on the same page, establishing themselves as they needed to establish themselves but not in some kind of a rigid formula; we tried to avoid very strongly the establishment of any kind of set of rules. So we got the office and I, if I had to identify one job that we had to do as the central office of the Canadian Wildlife Service in those very first years, was establish a trust. We built a huge amount of trust with our people in the development of the plan and overcome many of the barriers, as been explained in earlier panels, but that trust had to now go to where it really counted; the money and that everyone was going to get from the plan what they had anticipated getting from the plan and what the plan called for them to get. And that was a difficult process to establish and that happened over time and you know we were still having doubters, even in those first years, even after the signing of it, people saying “not a dime will ever come across the border” and these…that was still being said when I was sitting on the plan committee and we had to prove that not to be correct, and that’s where these first step projects that were so important came in because we hit the ground fast. Elsewhere in Canada, in terms of the Joint Ventures, they began to come together and all of a sudden the pressure was on them because the pressure was there, that they, there was money being gathered and there was money available and they then had to turn around and take all these wonderful goals, that were established at a Joint Venture level, and translate those into on the ground projects that could be delivered and be explained and written up in such a fashion that someone would be willing to put money towards them; 28
and that is by no means an easy job. And those people who had been doubters wouldn’t have put a lot of effort into that until such time that as it became obvious they had to do so. And there was a big scramble, it was…it wasn’t easy putting those first step projects together in such a fashion that they could go the International and go to people like Ken and the various states that came along and have something concrete to put on.
KR: I think a particular value of establishing those two offices, was there a demonstration to the Flyways and to the Joint Ventures that there was a federal commitment to the North American and they were well under staffed at the federal level.
DS: Ken can I go further down that road, we have the Canadian offices in place and from your perspective, in terms of the plan committee, now you have this implementation arm, we have a plan, you’re sitting on the plan committee, things are going along well; what was the role, how did the role change of the plan committee with having the two offices in place that you were the keeper of the plan, you were the one that your committee was the group that was the keeper of the plan, but now you had these implementation offices, you had Joint Ventures beginning to form, how did the role of the plan committee really change in these first years in terms of oversight, what it was looking at and trying to look ahead to keep the North American viable?
KR: Probably the major change was we stopped worrying about where we were going to find this initial funding to get the whole thing off the ground to more of an oversight role. Harvey mentioned the structure of the Joint Ventures; I recall we had to finally establish some kind of a guideline of what to call, that they would be called management boards because there was a variety of names across…across the board on these Joint Ventures. On the other hand, though, the committee and the plan was flexible enough to allow some differences and recognition that there had to be some differences. I think the…particular value of the plan was that the implementation on the ground wasn’t to be; well the implementation on the ground was to be implementation, not a lot of further planning, but actually getting something done. And I know this oversight role that the…board, the two offices (unclear) did that quite well because from the Joint Venture perspective and the Waterfowl Council, we never felt like we were being directed or you know ruled by your offices; it was more gentle guidance and prodding and so on, so it worked effectively. But I think that was the major change…at the beginning the committee was quite 29
concerned where we were going to find the funding because I remember the Canadian, Bob Andrews in particularity, would bring to each of the early meetings “Look I’ve staffed up, I’ve committed to my government, where’s the money, where’s it going to come from?” And that the beginning there we had no idea until the first steps were organized and money actually started to flow.
DS: But it was clear that we wanted to hit the ground, not only hit it, we wanted to turn it and we wanted to show people that we were actually making progress and I recall the urgency of putting the shovel in the dirt and making things happen out there and I think there was a strong will to get that done very quickly because that was some how proof to the world we not only had a plan but we could turn dirt with that plan and we can begin to pull partners together from all sources. I want just talk a little bit about partnerships, one of the unique things with the North American is partnerships and I heard Harvey talk about partnerships at the national level, one of the things that was going to happen, from my perspective with the North American, was partnerships were going to begin to change, become different, become very plastic at each Joint Venture level, some of the strong partners were at the national level but they were also at the board at the Joint Venture level. So we began to meld partnerships in many different ways, both nationally and all the way down to the ground level. And one of the most unique things was the North American and it’s ability to do that through the Joint Ventures and through the upper levels. How did this all come about in terms of partnerships, how…who came up with the concept and putting these partners together and how you built a machine to sort of help waterfowl from various sources? I don’t know where I’m going at with this whole idea but partnerships had been part of the North American, how did we pull all of this together, with getting the partners? I don’t know if anybody wants to take the lead on this one, Bob you have always had some thoughts about partners, but this is one of the things that made the North American unique.
BS: When I joined Harvey’s team in the spring of ’88, I think the concept of partnerships was already there. And it was part of the basic premise of the plan, you know, one of the strengths of the plan was it had specific goals, population goals and habitat objectives. Another one is built on the strength of partnerships; no one organization can do it on its own. And the third thing was it wasn’t highly structured, it was open and flexible to 30
change and adapt as it went along. So the partnership thing, as far as I knew, was always a basic concept of the plan and the people that really put it into place were the Joint Ventures, where they started bringing people to the table. Another partnership was the First Step Program, which we might talk about and I’ll turn that back over to Ken because he’s the man that laid the first $100,000 on the table and challenged the state partners to move money.
KR: True! I was thinking of there was some experience with partnerships before…cuz we already had a working partnership with DU, so there was groundwork and then as the Joint Ventures started taking a look at a landscape level, some of the additional partners needed to make it work became more and more obvious. The farmer and the forester were actually managing the wildlife so we knew we had to get those people involved if we were going to work on private lands, that type of thing. So it wasn’t the concept was valuable but it wasn’t that we never had partnerships before, so the basic groundwork for the partnership was some of the existing.
*Someone saying “wasn’t new, it was just putting them together and *
KR: and expanding way beyond what we had…
JM: The key, I think to the partnerships, was that we had broken down barriers at administrated levels, between states and providences and federal governments and non-governmental organizations and that experience just made us a lot more open to the opening up to other partners and that combined with our understanding and realization that the impossible job of doing this by ourselves was going to make it absolutely necessary to be open to anyone who wanted to come to the table and all they had to do was accept the goals and objectives of the plan and be willing to work with others. And that way they would come on and we would…the way we put it a lot was that, the partnerships made the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Everybody had jurisdictions, everybody had certain amount certain of money, everybody had certain amount of expertise but together we had all the expertise we needed, all the jurisdiction we needed and in the end, because of the good will and the turning of the soil as you said, the proof that we’re doing these kinds of things; the money was there and these things came together and because of partnerships that those things came together and it was not something that should be at all downplayed, it’s the heart of the North American Plan. 31
Without it, it doesn’t work and that’s what everybody else is trying to emulate and trying to emulate the success.
HN: I think a couple of other things happened too, while all this was going on. First of all you know when the plan was first purposed, it was six million acres that’s going to cost $1 ½ billion and back in those days that was a pretty staggering figure and that’s why we had all the nay sayers out there saying “this will never happen, it’s just another plan” so we had to get over that crisis. And the Joint Ventures were, they were a good vehicle for addresses that particular issue. And then furthermore the Joint Ventures, not only brought all these interested stakeholders to the table, but there was also a plan at every Joint Venture in their first year what they were going to do; so they started to see action in the first year or two, nobody was waiting. And it was sort of…accepted fact you couldn’t wait.
KR: Translated that billion-dollar figure down into some manageable bites too, when you get down into the Joint Ventures.
DS: Doable chucks, things that you could demonstrate and one of the things that I think that that did was prove that those big dollars that were being talked about, that nobody could conceive of, and that all of a sudden we’re actually within reach and potentially there could actually be spent to the effect that we had purposed that they would be in the plan.
BS: I’d like to give a real specific example that sticks in my mind of a partnership on the ground and of course as we, as Harvey and I and others toured around to these Joint Ventures to see what they’re doing, they wanted to show us what they’re doing. I remember standing at a dock down in Louisiana one day when they’re waiting for a boat to brought up to the launch there and it was a little bit late and the state people were kind of worried about you know “are we going to get off on time” and the, there was a TNC Nature Conservancy Biologist were there because they were going to take us out and show us their project. Well here, finally, came a federal truck with a state trailer and a federal boat on it; the federal trailer had had a bearing out that night or the night before so they had to come up with a state trailer, put the federal boat on it, for the Nature Conservancy and…the Louisiana state agency personal to drive out there. I mean it didn’t matter whose equipment it was, we’re all on a job and we’re going to make it, 32
make this happen and that just the attitude that just grew and grew and grew out in the field, whether it was in Canada or in lower Mississippi Valley or California etc.; this is the spirit of partnership and we’re going to make this thing happen and we’re all going to contribute to it and it’s going to be more than this, you know the sum will be more than the parts.
JC: There was another thing that occurred right in this same period of time that I don’t think was originally intended, maybe, to be related to the North American Waterfowl Management Plan but I came to Denver in 1988 and the first coordinator for the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture was in place, but also the initial pilot Private Lands Program in Region 3 and Region 6 was just under way, in fact my entire budget was out in the field starting that Private Lands Program. And Ken mentioned and others have mentioned the, you know, the private land owners and the foresters and so on that…we all now have seen involved in these Joint Ventures partnerships, at least some of the Joint Ventures. And so right at this same period of time, when the first Joint Ventures were starting, was this Private Lands Program and some states starting some private lands work that maybe they hadn’t been doing before and especially that has turned out to be a tremendous partnership and implementation process for the Joint Ventures.
DS: Let’s shift gears just for a little bit and…a part of the history that’s always intrigued me was the logo of the North American, as you all recall when the first document was written and had the canvas back on the cover it sort of became the signal…the icon for the uh for the North American but soon it had a new logo and today when the new logo has shown, it has instant recognition; the North American logo has become one of the, the best well known logo’s that I’m aware of in the waterfowl field. Um Harvey, Jim if you two want to take a crack at it, could you talk about the logo and the change from the canvas back to the new logo; some of the thoughts behind that and because it is a very unique logo and uh maybe just to give us some idea of how that all came about.
HN: Well just let me start by saying that uh initially we looked for the best artwork there was and uh we came upon this photograph that was taken up at the Agassiz Refuge in Minnesota by one Herb Dill, now deceased, canvas back (unclear) with a (unclear) and it was an exceptionally good photo. And we sort of adopted that as the initial, not logo necessarily… 33
[Someone saying “symbol” in background]
HN: symbol of the plan. But then we realized we had to go beyond that and we looked at various ways to do that and we had had our communications people scratching up different designs and we went to the private sector and to graphic artists to get some illustrations and suggestions and uh I’m going to let Jim Pat, Jim take it from there.
JM: Harvey did the work and Harvey’s staff and people pulled together a series of potential logos that we could use and um we made the mistake of actually trying to do logo by committee and that does not work. [Some laughing by various members of panel] And we had gone through several meetings looking at different kinds of logos and Harvey and I went, I guess it was to the North American at the Omani Sheraton in Washington here or something and Harvey and I were really tired of it; it’s over, forget it, we don’t want to do this anymore. So we sat down in the lobby there and chose between two, we said this one or this one; one was a duck leaping up out of habitat and the other is the logo that we now know. And we decided on that one but we consulted with higher powers to be sure that it was ok; Harvey consulted with Gene and I consulted with Enea, our wives, and they liked it and that was it. And nobody argued with us and now that logo can be find from the far artic to…Mexico and I’ll tell you something, it’s the one thing that symbolizes to me the pride that I have in all of the things that the North American has accomplished, is when you can go all over North America and see that logo and laugh about how it came about.
*BS: Just to capture one other aspect of it, the artist that designed this logo from which we chose from, I don’t remember his name, but he’s the same person that designed the John Deer logo of the leaping deer of “Nothing runs like a Deer” um and the symbolism…the circle is “unity”. The wings touching, and I don’t know if you’re able to zoom on this little pin here that I have and that several of us have, the wings touching symbolize partnerships, the movement symbolizes action across the borders and then I think the final thing is it’s reflection in what one reflected in the other, which is water, wetlands. So all those things were, were the things that were embodied in this logo and it has held well over the 20 years.
HN: And it symbolizes unity.
BS: Yea, Yea. 34
DS: Great logo, it quite a story. Um Bob…
KR: I can assure you, as a committee member, we were please you made the decisions, (unclear, everyone laughing)
DS: Bob, Jim touched on a subject I like to go to next and that’s Mexico. And that he talked about the logo being seen from the arctic all way to Mexico and today (unclear) that’s a true story, it is. But tell us about Mexico, in terms of…getting quote “the plan” south of that border or south of our border into Mexico, getting Mexico on as a signator and then beginning to work in Mexico, which for the first time we were going to spread our wings to quote “the rest of North America” that up to this point we just hadn’t go to but tell us the story of Mexico and getting them involved.
BS: I’ll tell you what I recall of it and others can fill in here, there were many attempts and many, in many of the documents that recognize that Mexico had to be eventually a partner in this North American Waterfowl Plan; and even precursors to the North American Plan. Um Mexico was interesting, they had a lot of changes in the government and every time a director, be a counterpart to the national or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Canadian Wildlife Service, every time that director was changed, which sometimes was two and three times in a year, the entire staff was changed; right on down to secretary’s. So it was very difficult for anyone trying to maintain the continuity with somebody in Mexico to uh, that was a biologist or a leader there; they kept disappearing, if you will. At the time the North American Plan was signed, the first time Mexico was not ready to sign on and the powers that be that were contacted, they were aware of it but they were just not prepared to sign on for probably several reasons; politically and some financially, they didn’t have a lot of money to do work . A very strong director came in, her name was (unsure of how to spell name, Victoria Grazeilla Del la Garza) and she was involved with the Tripartite Agreement, which is an agreement among Canada, U.S. and Mexico on many different species of interest and there was a little bit of money in Canada and the U.S. to send to projects in Mexico. Um, through that process we approached her and she still had no interest in signing onto the North American Plan cuz it was too narrow, it was kind of a duck plan, ducks were not that all important in her, in her vision in Mexico. Um…we’re jumping ahead a little bit but the North American Wetlands Conservation Act was signed and it started putting money into Canada and 35
Mexico and a little bit more substantial money than $25,000 at a whack; we’re willing to put several million across the borders. Grazeilla came to a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina of the North American Wetlands Conservation Council, approximately 1992. There were several Canadian projects or I’m sorry, Mexican projects that were being considered at that time, they were funded, approved to be funding and she recognized that Mexico could gain a lot by signing onto the North American Plan and the partnerships that were being spawned out of that. And so in a little bar on a piece of napkin at the Charleston Airport, we wrote down the conditions under which she was willing to allow Canada or Mexico to sign on with Canada and the U.S. on the North American Plan. That was then followed up by you know letters and things back and forth, she was willing to appoint someone to work on the update for the 1994 plan and then Mexico became a signator to the 1994 plan.
DS: Ok.
HN: I guess the only I could, you know, add to that is that as Bob indicated, during our earlier discussions with them, uh they recognized the value of the plan and how it could be beneficial to Mexico, but because of other ongoing internal strife and other agreements that they were debating what their roles should be; they weren’t very comfortable at that stage, at least in my opinion, the people that we talked with about stepping forward and saying “Yes we’ll participate now.” There were many reasons for that as you perhaps indicated, but it kept the dialog open and I think that was the important thing; every chance we had, we made some trips down there, specifically about that. And then when they modified they the tripartite agreement at one stage, they felt that would be adequate for them to continue to…discussions with the U.S. and Canada. And they did that essentially up until the time she made the decision to sign on, which was a good stroke of business.
DS: Okay, we’re going to switch gears just a little bit and go into some of the technical aspects of implementation um I worked as a population specialist on the plan, Carl Madsen a counterpart of mine worked as a habitat specialist. Carl was busy trying to figure out a way to count acres and achievements that we were making with the North American Plan, we were turning lots of dirt in those days and we needed a real track record in terms of what we were doing and Carl was busy working on that. I was busy 36
looking at the population aspects, interpretation of those goals that were put into place. We had flyway management plans for geese and we were tracking their populations, um we had goals in there, which was the decade of the 1970’s, which serves our benchmark for ducks. But now people were asking harder questions and these questions had to do with the connectivity of these habitat efforts that we were making on the ground and what effect we would have on duck populations, waterfowl populations, down the road. As I was on the road and Harvey sent me with a pocket of airline tickets, and I was communicating the plan, one of the things I heard from our partners was “when will we see the results of our work? Can duck populations recover?” As you recall they were at virtually all time continental lows in ’85, we went through another series of regulatory restrictions in ’88, there was definite concern over the…level that we had duck populations at and then their ability to recover; if indeed we could put the habitat back on the land. I ran into countless numbers of people that said “Maybe ducks can never recover again, even if we were successful at putting all the habitat on the land” and so people wanted to see some accomplishments and so at that point under the direction of Harvey, I created the continental evaluation team and began to pull together technical experts from Canada and the U.S. to begin to look at the population aspects and the linkage, more importantly, of habitat to populations and that work continues to this day; probably one of the hardest things that we would ever do in terms of trying to link the populations and habitat. With that in mind, I guess my next question is to John Cornely and it gets back to some of the technical aspects. John at the field level you were involved with technical committees and several Joint Ventures and what was the thinking in those days in how to take those lofty goals out of the North American Plan, bring those into a Joint Venture, then put those on the ground and insure that indeed those activities were going to result in help to waterfowl. What was the thinking going on in those days and tech. committees?
JC: Well at the very beginning, you know, we really didn’t even attempt a direct linkage you know we had these partnerships forming. The first one I was involved with was a Prairie Pothole Joint Venture…the management board was forming as I moved into my new role as a Migratory Bird Coordinator and I was on the first technical committee and we were considered, still considered, the flag ship Joint Venture in the U.S. along with 37
the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture in Canada and one of the most critical areas that we need to work. Uh…remember what Rollie Sparrow said in one of the earlier interviews, at this period of time we were in a prolonged drought, populations were very low, Dave you just alluded to the, you know some of us, I was in discussions with you; there was a lot of, I was a little newer to this business, but a lot of folks had been around for a long time, were beginning to doubt whether, even if water came back, the populations were so low, would the ducks respond. Well, in a few years we found that they could respond very fast and very well if the habitat was there and that kind of kick started all of us. But what we were very fortunate in the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, because we had Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota that had been working on modeling the mallard life cycle. And they had also been piloting some landscape level evaluation tools and right at the time when our technical committee for the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture was established, …Dick Smith and others in the Fish and Wildlife Service said “it’s time for this research project to become operational” and it was up to Regions 3 and Region 6, in the middle of the country, to take over that process, originally designed to evaluate duck production on refuge land verses waterfowl production areas verses private lands because we didn’t have a good way to compare what was happening across the landscape on these different land jurisdictions. But the timing was just such that that became one of our, the best evaluation tools that we have to this date because we had, we have since the…probably late ‘80’s early ‘90’s we have sample plots throughout the five states in the U.S. where we have… hard, digitalized data on the exact wetlands…how many acres were in those plots. We also had folks go out there every year and do bird counts and do pair counts before that and we’ve had aerial video the recorded the water. We also had people spend hours and hours in county clerks offices and…putting down on maps land ownership; what was private land, what was state land, what was federal land. So that formed kind of the basis for an evaluation and we felt like we needed tiers of evaluations, we needed one that was like Joint Venture wide where we could see gross changes on the landscape and the conservation reserve program that came in just before that, as well, it’s one of those things that we could see at that landscape level but became very important. We also felt like then we needed…finer, scale evaluation tools, being some of these pair counts and bird counts and other kinds of 38
surveys but then kind of project by project evaluations, we take a smaller area of land, we decide on some prescriptions to do habitat restoration, different treatments, fire, maybe grazing uh but we needed to go in there and say, up front, what we expected the benefits would be of our land management and then be able to, on a project level basis, to actually say whether it worked or not, so if it worked we could repeat it, if it didn’t work we could try to fine tune it and do something else. I was fortunate enough, I don’t know if anybody else has had this…fortune that I did, I was at one time on four different technical committees. The first technical committees were the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, the Rain Water Basin Joint Venture in Nebraska, the (?) Lakes Joint Venture in Texas and I was the first U.S. representative on the Arctic Goose Joint Venture technical committee. And it you look at that geographical, all of those Joint Ventures dealt with the same resources and different times of the year and…in the two countries. And…we tried…my role was to try and relate, from Joint Venture to Joint Venture, some of the successes and failures and monitoring and evaluation and remind them that they were taking care of the same birds up and down the flyways.
DS: Okay, I like to shift gears just a little bit and Bob and (unclear of name) let me go back you for a question. And now we have this thing that’s out there, it went from a very early implementation stage, we’re tracking acres and we’re counting ducks and we’re looking at linkages out there, things are beginning to move, we have partners that are looking; how do we communicate with this cad way of people? And when I was in Minneapolis, we were working with a lady by the name of Katherine Holmeman, later Bill McDougle in Washington was working with it, I know the Canadian…I know Jim you’ll have some thoughts here, but how were we dealing with the communication, Bob, with all these many partners that were out there in the Joint Ventures nationally and at the local level and we had some communication challenges but what was happening there to address that problem with communicating with all these many partners?
BS: Early on there was a paper or a brochure, if you will, publication we put out called Waterfowl 2000 and that was the intial document across Canada, the U.S. to try to explain to the partners in the plan what was going on, it was not oriented towards outside general purpose, public. There had been a slide show put together, a very good slide show, a brochure about the North American Plan that was being used by the public. Then 39
each Joint Venture started developing their own communications plans, which brought it down to the local level too. And so, again, it was a partnership type of thing, the International Association of Fish and Wildlife writers, Outdoor Writers Association, they took on the North American as kind of a project, if you will, and they were writing articles in many of the different outlets. Each state made a commitment that their internal, their document, their like Colorado Outdoors or New York Conservationist; they would produce articles about the North American Plan. So it was, again, a multi-facetted approach that all the partners decided to do. You looked at Ducks Unlimited magazines, Ducks Unlimited magazine had an article, every magazine, something about the North American Plan or what it was doing and editorials in there about the North American Plan. The Awards Program that was established for international award or state award or local awards, that was a way for partners to be recognized for their good work and then that was published in newspapers etcetera, etcetera. There were presentations made at national meetings, papers published by various of us that were authors about the North American Plan and its accomplishments and then the accomplishments reports that came in, trying to put back to the Congress how many acres were being put together in Mexico, Canada, the U.S. (unclear) that we’re being acquired, managed, enhanced, etcetera; wetland acres that were being restored, it just became pervasive and any other organizations help with that.
DS: And no longer was the best kept secret and we didn’t want it to be. The public was well aware of what we were doing, they were well aware of the plait of waterfowl and what was being done to address that and we’re I’m going with this, we began to set the stage for the work on getting a more stronger funding commitment to get a lot of the habitat work done on the ground. And so in the period, and I don’t know exactly when it all started, the idea came about that we had to have a more secure, long-term funding capability for some of these North American Projects and Bob I don’t know exactly where to start this history because it’s right in the period that we’re talking about. But could you talk a little bit about the early days of trying to get an idea across through Congress, a funding mechanism for the North American, the Mitchell Bills it was called in the early days and later the North American Wetland Conservation Act, but could you kind of set the stage for us as we came into that part of our history? 40
BS: Okay, and this is kind of like a set of blind men describing the elephant in a way and we can maybe give a framework for it but there are many other people that were involved in this that I don’t know about, Harvey might know about some etcetera. But basically it started with the First Step Program, the monies that were the states, like Ken put forward $100,000 and that was matched by some other states, so all of a sudden we had a million dollars.
KR: California…
BS: California put mon...and Colorado, etcetera; so we had a million dollars from the states. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation was willing to match that, DU was going to match in there, so pretty soon we had four million dollars that had come up be, to go to Canada but there had to a mechanism to get it there. Part of this mechanism, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation had to have its charter change by active legislator to allow it to become international and there was a Senator Caston, I believe Rollie mentioned earlier, came up with some source of money that would go to the foundation that would be the federal match. The second year Senator Mitchell put in the appropriations act for some of the land and water conservation monies, two million to go into the second step where the states brought in money; DU again was going to match it, the foundation was able to move it across the borders. And during this time, there were many, there were several staffers from different from different members offices in both the Senate and the House that were discussing something more long term and what, and I don’t have all the details in it, but the culmination of it was Bob Davison and Senator Mitchell’s staff, eventually, with other partners in Congress, got an act passed that’s called The North American Wetlands Conservation Act, December, signed December 13 of 1989 that authorized up to 15 million dollars a year to go to the North American Wetlands Conservation Act Program, which the organization on the ground this far were are Joint Ventures under the North American Plan; although it wasn’t limited to those, those were the people who were ready to receive this kind of money. Then you have the appropriations process, Senator Stevens and his staff with some very strong support from, from Ducks Unlimited, were able to put money in the very first appropriation bill, I think was fiscal year starting in fall of 1990. I think there was about seven million in that fiscal year and they next year it increased and it just grew and right now that act is up to, I think 41
$40 million has been appropriated by Congress for the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.
DS: In your view Bob, how important was that legislation, those dollars to getting this to where we’re at today with the North American and maybe even with what the future looks like? How important was that and everything that we’re doing as we put this building blocks together?
BS: Well dollar wise, there probably wasn’t any other single act that was any more important than that. But the work that had been done in Canada and the U.S. from 1987 on in developing these Joint Ventures and detailing the projects on the ground and building these partnerships, who then applied for act dollars; you can’t discount the impact of the North American Plan and its partners putting it together. Um the act has gone beyond the North American Plan, doesn’t, hasn’t left the plan but its…wetlands conservation for many different species. It’s still a major funding source for North American Plan partners but…I think it was equal importance to any other single action that occurred and it’s certainly the most important funding mechanism but, again, it’s built on the shoulders of many giants in terms of getting it implemented.
JM: To go back to the beginning of the Wetlands Conservation Act, Canada throughout the process of developing the North American Plan had to be very careful about the fact that the…we were two sovereign nations and it was an issue that we had to be fairly careful about at the same time as working closely and when it came time to do the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, Canada was obviously was very supportive of the process but was very sensitive about how it could support that. And we managed through people like Jim Patterson and others to meet with congressional staffers along with our U.S. counterparts and to convey to them…Canada’s support and preparation and readiness to take on these kinds of responsibilities and roles that came, came with that. And at one point, Canada was asked to testified in front before a Senate Committee and Jim Patterson was going to do that but we were banned from doing so by our Embassy because we couldn’t take an oath before a foreign power; and that’s how sensitive this got to be and Jim went ahead, he didn’t take the oath, they adjoined and then they talked to him. But that cost Jim something because we needed to express how much we supported that and there were other occasions where I had opportunities to speak with 42
staffers, both on the administration side and the Congressional side, and express Canada’s support for what was happening here and I don’t think that… anything has topped the North American Act in terms of being able to implement the North American Plan in Canada; and it certainly put paid to all those concerns that never a dime would flow across the border. I still tell people at parties that you know there’s still you know $40 million a year across the border from the United States and they still can’t believe it. And so its significance was absolutely essential and if it didn’t exist we’d have to find something else and so you know the support of Congress was key and that then brought on states.
KR: As I recall there was a stimulus for a lot of Joint Venture, new Joint Venture proposals (people laughing) and so one of the issues (unclear, still laughing) became trying to maintain the focus on Canada and the prairie habitats.
JC: Everybody wanted a piece of it.
KR: Yea, it was real of a sudden.
JM: Well at the same time, then, not only were the new Joint Ventures being proposed in the United States but that’s when the Pacific Coast Joint Venture came about in 1990 and 1991 and this kind of time frame, we got the first truly international Joint Venture working across borders where as a single Joint Venture from the northern part of British Columbia to just north of San Francisco, worked together as a unit and it was a wonderful symbol of how far we had come in terms of partnerships to be able to actually work a single Joint Venture across boundary.
BS: I like to go back and mention the Implementation Board again. It served as a, for a lack of a better term, a lobbying group although they were an education groups, since they weren’t all lobbyist. But the Implementation Board members and their staff played real key roles in helping design the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and get it passed through and encouraged a lot of members of Congress to support, it had overwhelming support when it was passed and that was done to, partners in the private sector and probably need to have, sometime, have another session just with, maybe, with some of these partners that were involved with the North American Act and get their recollections and the behind the scenes stories recorded too. 43
*JC or JM: If you want to put paid to this whole North American Wetlands Conservation Act aspect, President Bush Senior, made a speech supporting that and a few months later we able in Canada to have the Prime Minister of Canada to make a speech in support of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And so on one end the plan deals with land owners and individuals and local communities and states and providences and national governments and departments and agencies but it also deals with Presidents and Prime Ministers; talk about covering the range.
HN: You know Bob’s reference to the different partners that were involved in the Implementation Board, for example, but I recall one of the key benefits that came out of that very early on was that the representative from the National Association of Soil Conservation Districts, they were present and (unclear) became a strong believer in the North American and it did wonders…the Department of Agriculture.
BS: I like to follow up on that one, at the same time all this other things were occurring, we have other agencies in the U.S., in the federal government the U.S. that perhaps in Canada too, Jim can talk…
JM: the FRA.
BS: things dealing with policy and other organizations, that’s what Harvey was talking about in the Department of Agriculture, we’ve had the Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, they wanted to not get our money but they wanted to piggy back and support the North American Plan. They developed a program called Taking Wing, which they got funded with the help of the Implementation Board lobbying to Congress, they got it funded for about $1.2 million in their first year; Taking Wing is still ongoing, it’s to enhance, restore, promote wetlands on national forest lands. The Bureau of Land, Bureau of Indian Affairs, early on when we were still in Minneapolis, came to us and they developed a program with our support and encouragement called Circle of Flight, where on various Indian reservations they were trying to protect and enhance and restore wetlands.
HN: Still doing it.
BS: Bureau of Land Management has a program that they originally called Wetlands 2000, which is evolved into some other things and they receive money, lobbied for them to receive money from Congress to do work on BLM lands to promote wetland 44
conservation for wetlands, waterfowl. There were many other organizations uh USDA, we had were able to swamp buster, piggy back on swamp buster on a…
[Someone saying sod buster]
BS: CRP and on the FMHA taking back lands Fish and Wildlife Service being able to put easements on those lands to protect wetlands before they were sold back to other farmers. And it just…other agencies in the federal government piggy backed on this in the U.S. and I know Canada, Jim you had some things like that.
JM: Yea we had very much similar working with agriculture department, Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, Ag. Regional groups associated with the Pacific Coast Joint Venture and not only did you have government departments and agencies but you also had providences doing things like passing legislation for permanent easements. In the Canadian law, an easement could terminate on the sale of a property and you needed special legislation passed in various places in order that an easement, a conservation easement or any other kind of easement, could be made permanent so that you don’t end up losing all that you’ve invested in and so providences went out of their way to change their legislation in order for things like that to happen. We also put into place, at the federal government, tax benefits; in our Canadian tax forms there’s a… the last line is ecological gifts and it’s there now and it means that if you are farmer Brown and you give your back 40 to Ducks Unlimited or The Nature Conservancy and its high ecological value, you could use that as a tax deduction for the rest of your life. And it’s completely different than the way it use be treated and last I heard from Clayton Ruebeck, who ran that program, we’ve done $100 million worth of land protection under that kind of rubric. And it’s just an outstanding development and it came from the kind of work that was done by the Canadian North American Wetlands Conservation Council as well as the North American Plan Committee in Canada that realized that there was one dimension that we had to work on, the legal side of the question.
HN: I just have a couple other thoughts, Dave, at some point I hope that we’re able to identify a lot of the people that you know worked on this and uh, in the background and we’ve talked about that before. But there were some key players and at some point we outta be able to recognize or at least go on a list of contributors or supporters. For example, you know one of the strongest persons that we had in Washington D.C. during 45
the evolution of the North American Plan was Jim Range; former Congressional staffer, you all know Jim and uh just an example of a person, we don’t talk about that much. And it’s too bad that Red Hunt isn’t on this panel because from California Red, of course, was on of the strong supporters of the Plan and has worked with it continuously right through to this date, even after retirement and they were the first state to contribute a half of million dollars from their duck stamp fund. And you can say the same for a number of other states, so some of those things go…
KR: Gary Myers.
HN: Gary Myers spent a lifetime on it.
JC: One of the things that Jim alluded to this earlier and I think it fits in with some of this recent discussion but it’s just the, beyond waterfowl and wetlands, just the way of doing business that the North American Plan brought to all of our, all of our jobs; Dave you as a Central Flyway representative and myself as a Regional Migratory Bird Chief, we spend still a lot of time on setting regulations. Back before the North American Plan, that was most of the time we spent with our state partners, was in that kind of situation and it wasn’t always very friendly. They often wanted different objectives than we did and we had some pretty heated discussions about things. Then these Joint Ventures started within these Flyways and we sat down at the table with them and we found out that we had a lot more in common with those state partners and with our other federal partners, the Forest Service, BLM uh you know National Park Service…
[Someone saying “USDA”]
JC: USDA. And it has made it our whole jobs, I think, more pleasant and more productive because we found ways of looking for common goals and overlap in objectives and it’s kind of deemphasized in a way, the fighting and the differences and I think that’s allowed us to make a lot of accomplishments that I don’t think we would have learned that without something like this new way of approaching conservation.
HN: And I hope whatever you do with these sessions and whatever comes out of them, that at some point it’s possible to give a current state of events. You know, one of the accomplishments right now and the program is still going strong and the accomplishments are beyond anybody’s imagination when we started. 46
DS: It was a dream and it was a vision, it was a plan and when you really think back on it, it was whole evolution in terms of what we’re doing. John I think that you said it the best, it changed the way that we did national resource management in North American. But fellows we have ended the part of this panel, where we wanted to get so we, you’ve done well, thank you. You brought us up to the act and putting it into place and the next major phase will be to think about Joint Ventures and the actual implementation on the ground of the North American. We’re look at our accomplishments as Harvey said and continue to work on that list of all the people that were, that had a role in this North American. Thank You. 47

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Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: North American Waterfowl Management Plan (Part 2 of 2)
Date of Interview: January 10, 2006
Location of Interview:
Mediator for First Panel: Bob Streeter
Mediator for Second Panel: Dave Sharp
First Panel Consists of: Red Hunt, Harvey Nelson, Rollie Sparrow, Dick Hopper, and George Finney
Second Panel Consists of: Ken Rick, Bob Streeter, Harvey Nelson, Jim McQuaig, and John Cornely
Most Important Projects: North American Waterfowl Management Plan
Brief Summary of first panel: Talks about the concept of forming a plan and early implementation to about 1987. Talks about it taking shape in he 1984, 1985 time period. Had meeting at Remington Farm in Maryland. Knew it had to be an international plan. Talked about writing the plan, negotiations between the U.S. and Canada about what to include in the plan. How to get money into Canada to help them implement the plan. Talked about the need for partnerships, the importance of farm policies in both countries and prioritizing the issues. Coining the Joint Venture concept, establishing the first designated areas in the U.S. and Canada. Wanted to take a responsible approach to achieve goals. Had people responsible for editing the first plan and had a oversight committee that was “keeper” of the plan.
Brief Summary of second panel: Started with time period 1987 and went to around 1990. Talked about Joint Venture Management Boards, the North American Wetland Conservation Act with getting money to Canada and Mexico. Getting Mexico signed on with the North American Plan. Talked about the logo and how it picked by Harvey and Jim. Talked about partnerships and how people worked together to get the job done, addressing the communications issues also to help get people on the same page. Had an awards program to recognize people or groups that did a good job. Talked about other supporters, such as other government agencies. Wanting to recognize others who worked in the background to help get this done. 2
KEY:
BS
Bob Streeter
RS
Rollie Sparrow
RH
Red Hunt
DH
Dick Hopper
HN
Harvey Nelson
GF
George Finney
*not sure who is talking or if particular person marked as talking is correct
My name is Bob Streeter. I’m a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee. I had the opportunity to work the North American Waterfowl Management Plan in a couple of capacities and help implement the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. We have a panel here today that’s going to be talking about the period from when the plan, North American Waterfowl Management Plan, uh concept had been basically agreed upon and then during the writing the period until it’s early implementation. Until this document here, that we call the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, it was signed in May of 1986, became a document that brought a lot of partners to the table to protect wildlife habitat across the continent. And the people I have with me here today are (unclear) group. First of all I like to introduce Red Hunt, Red is from California and he was on the Waterfowl uh from the state of California waterfowl programs for years and became active in the early days of the North American Plan and has continued as a retiree to represent California on the North American Waterfowl Management Plan Committee and the council staff for the North American Wetlands Conservation Council. Next to Red is Harvey Nelson; Harvey has been involved in the North American Plan also from before it was even conceived. He’s worked with waterfowl, waterfowl research, management and was active in the development of the Plan; was the first director of the U.S. office that implemented the Plan and is still, in his retirement years, still active in waterfowl issues. Rollie Sparrowe, Dr. Rollie Sparrowe, who was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Migratory Bird Management Office, he was one of the first technical uh persons working with the North American Plan; continued on as Deputy Assistant Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and then with the Wildlife Management Institute. Rollie is now retired and, but continues in his conservation work uh nation wide and well as locally in Wyoming, where he lives. Next gentlemen is Dick Hopper, state of Colorado, Dick is a waterfowl researcher, waterfowl biologist in Colorado and was has been active in the early days of the North American Plan Committee and has uh continued with his interests 3
in this area. And finally the last member is our partner from Canada, Dr. George Finney. George was with the Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada and uh is now with a group called Bird…
GF: Bird Studies Canada.
BS: Bird Studies Canada and uh is a non-government organization, in Canada. These gentlemen will uh will be discussing and debating and uh pulling some the background out of their, their heads, what they remember in terms of the meetings they were at; who was there, who did what and try, we’re going to try and take this period from about 1984, when there was a meeting in Remington Farms uh Maryland, where there was a group of biologists and administrators from Canada, from the U.S. that came to an agreement that there had to be international plan and the North American Waterfowl Management Plan that would incorporate all of the other mini plans that had been worked on for several years going back some of them back to the 1950’s. This North American Plan would take shape in the period of 1984, 1985, negotiations to get it approved in Canada, the U.S. thru the ’85 to the signing in ’86, and then we’ll talk a little bit about, go into the first maybe the first year of the Plan Committee uh establishment and how they emerged to govern the North American Waterfowl Management Plan as it actually started being delivered in the ground. So lets go back to Remington Farms, 1984, and Harvey I think you were at that meeting, can you then summarize what you thought was the result, the summary of that meeting, what came out of it in terms of agreements between the Canadian and U.S. personal that were there.
HN: Well, may have to back up just a bit cuz there were a lot of people at that meeting. Uh I was in an administrative capacity and uh didn’t really participate in the full meeting, but uh this was the acumination of a lot of earlier attempts to get some agreement in principle about developing an international plan, something that would oversee the two national plans that had been developed or in a process of being developed and try to focus on the real needs at the moment. And uh that, the negotiating committee uh…also was there the drafting of the plan and uh others around this table today were involved more directly in the drafting process and the other negotiations that followed. But I think one of the other important things we talked about in a different panel, was that uh at that stage, just prior to that meeting, there had been a gathering of some of the key 4
administrators in Canada and the United States and it was important to get those key people around the table and get a common agreement on this is the way to go and this will indeed be an international plan and then there was concern as to whether or not it needed to be a treaty or not, we talked about that in earlier session. And the ultimate outcome of all that discussion was that, let’s make it an international agreement; doesn’t have to go thru all the state department approval and similar approval in Canada and that’s what led then to the, the uh negotiating committee that was present, the members that were present, of which a number became part of the drafting committee. And uh perhaps Rollie or others that were more actively involved in the drafting committee could speak to that part of it.
BS: Before we go to that Harvey, could you dredge up and names of any of the people that may have been at that meeting at Washington between Canadian folks and the U.S. folks? Was it at Secretary of Interior level, was it the Directors of the Fish and Wildlife, Canadian Wildlife Service, do you recall any particulars on that? I know you weren’t directly involved in that but do remember any of those?
HN: Well, my understanding was it was strictly and informal uh meeting to be sure that everybody in the administrative position or responsibility to help make those decisions, was present and a chance to offer their final comments and agree in principle that this was the way to go. So there be no further debate or misunderstanding later and then they also had to make some decision about uh whether or not it was to be a treaty or an amendment to a treaty or call it a general, or just a international agreement; which it turned out to be.
BS: Ok.
HN: Uh there were a number of people at a meeting at Washington and uh…you know I can remember some of them but I’m reluctant to try and name all of them, I might miss some.
BS: Ok, thanks. Well we had a letter that came in from Dick Yancey, from Louisiana, he was a member of that first negotiating committee and he gave us a list of from Canada there was Douglas Rosenburogh from Toronto, who was a Canadian uh…
GF: He was the uh…
BS: Canadian Wildlife Service or… 5
GF: No he was Ontario Providential Director.
BS: Ok, and uh Bob Andrews, who’s Director of Wildlife from Edmonton from Alberta.
GF: Yea, right.
BS: Uh George, Dr. Finney was on that committee and represented Canadian Wildlife Service. From the Untied States, it was Don Minnich who was a… Associate Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service at that time for refuges and wildlife…
[Someone saying Deputy]
BS: deputy. Dr. John Rogers, who was the uh… Migratory Bird Management Office at that time. Uh Jack Grebe was a Fish and Wildlife Service consultant. He was a former Director of the Colorado Division of Wildlife but he was hired as a former, as a consultant there as experienced in waterfowl. Kevin Lloyd, from North West territories. Dr. Bob Bailey, was a Canadian Wildlife Service uh kind of a counter part, I believe, to John Rogers the technical uh…
GF: no Jake Grebe, he was our writer.
BS: No, uh Bob Bailey.
GF: Bob Bailey was our writer.
BS: He was your writer, ok.
GF: Jim Patterson…
BS: Jim Patterson was there…
GF: was the counterpart.
BS: then Dr. Jim Patterson was the next one and Rollie, you were there. And uh, then it says (unclear) Dick Yancey. So that was the first negotiating committee, did that, the composition of this committee change over the next year while this uh, first draft was occurring?
GF: No, (unclear) Wallen took over from John Rogers when he moved to Alaska. Um and that’s when Don Minnich came on.
*RS: And Don Minnich came on. They had that Remington Farms meeting um, I think there may have been another person or two there, but what you’re describing is the actually steering company that set about writing the plan. And at that point I took John Rogers job and he went to Alaska and I think it stayed pretty stable through, certainly to the first draft the next spring. 6
BS: And the people who actually did the writing, was Bob Bailey and Jack Grebe. How did that come about?
*RS: When we met as a group, we took a shot at writing some parts of it and negotiating some parts of it and suggesting exact wording and then when we were done with each meeting, those two guys were charged with putting the pieces together and putting it in uh written format and then it would come back to us for review prior to the next meeting.
GF: The uh, the first meeting at Remington Farms, from my recollection, was um we had had discussions back and forth between principally the Migratory Bird Offices and CWS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But it was the first time that we came forward with essentially an agenda on each side of the issue, about what we felt needed to be in the plan. Uh what was important to us and so we can, from the Canadian side we came forward with a proposition about widespread habitat protection plan; that did require funding from the United States in order to help us out. Um, we didn’t know going into that meeting whether that would even be acceptable as a proposition in the States. We similarly were there talking about how we were going to handle issues related to trying… to calm down the regulatory process. Um, were talking about substance harvesting issues and other issues like that. So as I recollect, Rollien, the principal meeting or the principal meetings were sorting out whether we, our agenda was common enough that we could actually proceed. And in reviewing my notes, (unclear) as I got back from that meeting, my basic conclusion was that the hard work had been done with getting through the providences and then, in fact, the agenda between the Canada and the United States was very very similar; and that the principals that we and the main items were larger in accordance and that didn’t mean there weren’t other important issues around, but we felt confident enough coming out of the initial meeting to really put our foot down on the accelerator. And we got through, I think, in four meetings or perhaps five we got through negotiating the first draft and in uh something like seven months, which was quite remarkable when you think about.
*RS: It was, and we directly confronted such issues as what did we need to know that we didn’t have in hand and we would then charge often our Migratory Bird Office, and I’d go back to the staff and hand them the request for the data that we thought we needed to illustrate things down the road for the to continue the writing and of course the writing 7
itself, any time something went down on a piece of paper, a lot of people had a kind of network wanting to see this, even though there wasn’t direct public involvement in this there was a lot of networking out thru the councils to the states and the providences and so there was input from a lot of people who were never there.
*GF: And one of the most important things I think that we concluded at that session was that we weren’t going to try to drive this as solely as government programming, that our non-government partners uh such as Ducks Unlimited and Wildlife Habitat Canada and others which emerged uh would be, could be and would be featured as the delivers of the program. Which may, which confirmed the fact we needed to develop a very broad, basic partnership in order to deliver the program and really sent a challenge out in front of us; not that some partnerships didn’t already exist but uh it… we really did come to the conclusion that government agencies themselves couldn’t themselves couldn’t deliver this program; it was too ambitious.
*RS: One strong focus that we identified in those very first meetings was the importance of farm policies in both countries and we had had a, I think, had had a bit of a jump ahead of Canada in working directly with our farm bill, it’s a different kind of system, but that did indeed become right from the start a major focus on how to deliver changes on the landscape.
BS: Wasn’t there recognition early on that this plan could not be one strictly acquisition, that that’s why it had to move out with private lands, work with Ag. Programs, other government entities, try to get everyone stirring towards the same end point?
*RS: Well as George described in those first four, five meetings, we talked about things like those kinds of strategies uh and we knew very well that a whole bunch of it, acquisition, wouldn’t be compatible in either country with politics and economics and a lot of realities and so we were focusing on what became an important principal out of the plan was learning to use other people’s money and other programs, like agriculture, that we’d only partially been connected to, where it wasn’t money given in the name of wildlife but we could work within those programs to make outcomes on the landscape that got done what we thought needed to get done. So, we had a lot of pretty fundamental discussion. Another one that hasn’t been mentioned, was vitally important, is the American team rather readily accepted uh that the mandate to deliver would be 8
larger in terms of dollars in the U.S. because with more people and uh a more of a interest in harvest and recreational utilization of the birds, when they came down into the United States, that we would have to find a way to send resources to Canada where the habitat was to get the job done. And that was a pretty fundamental agreement that we came up to quite early.
*GF: There was also, in the process, forces at work that which were trying to prioritize the, where we would put or programs and one of the things we came…uh we came to the conclusion that if we’re going to have a broad enough political constituency in order to sell this program at the magnitude that we needed to sell it, that we need to have a… we needed to have a truly uh national program that contemplated programming from coast to coast and from south to north. What else was I recollect had to deal with some rather silly issues, there was a proposition on the table at one point that mergansers not be considered waterfowl and be excluded from the plan (everyone kind of laughing/chuckling) because it didn’t taste very good. But then again we concluded that uh…that probably wasn’t a really good long-term strategy (everyone kind of laughing).
* HN: You know another important dimension of that meeting and one of the outcomes was the renewed emphasis on the importance of private lands. And it dub tails with the, what’s been said about the, need all the cooperatees you can get and you had to recognized that a lot of the habitat out there that people were talking about existed on private lands and there have to be some mechanisms developed to provide enough incentives to private land owners to be willing to participate.
*DH: I think these were all the things that were talked and considered (unclear, a noise disrupting tape) Venture. Uh the concept of Joint Venture would, you know, we recognize that uh this focus of this plan was waterfowl but at the same time we knew well enough that there are many other migratory birds uh that utilize these wetlands and associated uplands as well as what 250 species of rare and endangered birds. And uh, not to mention mammals, that sort of thing so I think it was an effort to uh, to try to uh gain all those interests that we could at the grass roots level so that everybody had an ownership in it and were more willing to contribute uh, deliver the funds that uh were available to us. 9
BS: I might be putting you on the spot a little bit here but uh, Red and Dick, would you address from the state prospective and maybe the international’s prospective, what was the climate going into these discussions in terms of the creative tension between the states and the federal government in the U.S. and where you might want to address this a little bit?
RH: Yes, it uh, I think there was a great learning process in participating in the North American as far as the states were concerned. Uh, within the states there were a certain amount of parochialism uh between the states there was a little bit of jealously, between the Flyways there was quite a bit of jealously and between the states and the federal there was even more. And what we had to learn right away is that by working together we could get the job done and if you just wanted to take the short route, or so to speak, it wouldn’t happen so that was the biggest change. And the other one that was apparent to us is that we saw the need to get something done in Canada right away and the overriding thing we first got started was someway to expand on what DU had been doing in the prairie providences in Canada and really get out the habitat thing, so we went out and beat the drums to get all the support we could for getting U.S. dollars into Canada.
DH: Yea I think the bottom line was that uh, the flyways recognized the, that something needed to be done habitat wise. We were in a bad situation there for a number of years and uh, so it was I think it was easy for the Flyways to overlook some of the internal squabbles that might have been apparent to us. In recognizing then that uh we needed to focus our efforts, especially in the production areas, and that was basically Canada and uh…the Flyways, I really believed, welcomed the implementation of the plan.
BS: Rollie did you want to comment on that?
RS: Interesting to mention is keep in mind the timing of this. While the plan was being written, people like me in my role of the Fish and Wildlife Service came forward and proposed to the states 25% reduction in waterfowl harvest nationally and had some pretty tumultuous years in our actions that I personally feel that the fact that we were simultaneously building this other goal and working toward it, and it came out right then, probably saved us from going further in the acrimony and the disagreements because we all had begun to fix on this plan and the habitat base as a way out of this dilemma.
BS: George, you didn’t face any of those issues in Canada did you? 10
[Everyone laughing]
GF: Yes we did, we had our fair share. Um and dealing with um… uh harvesting the plan was one of the most difficult areas that we had given the fact that we were trying to, as I said earlier, calm down the amount of time that we were spending on the allocation and regulation decisions. Um and I think we came up with a formula that ultimately worked quite well. We also set aside some other issues that uh, for other fora, mostly notably I think is substance harvesting issue, which was not really resolved until the protocol to amend the Migratory Bird Convention Act in 19 uh, 1994 I believe. And there were some issues that we just didn’t have the technical knowledge to know really what to do about; um, so we set up some species Joint Ventures, which were basically science Joint Ventures. And uh for one group of birds, the sea ducks, at the time we recognized that there were important issues there but we really didn’t have the information in front of us so it took another 10 to 15 years until the Sea Duck Joint Venture was born and I think that was really picking up unfinished business from 1985. And that brought in, in a real way, Alaska and Labrador and the North West territories into the frame work of the plan and to a degree they felt um, they felt that their issues weren’t being addressed until that was done, so. The plan is a continually involving issue, as everyone knows. We did a lot of work in ’84 and ’85 but we didn’t get it all done.
BS: Dick you and George both mention Joint Venture, as a little side trip here, when did you, when did any of you first recall the term Joint Venture being coined and applied?
[Someone saying Rollie]
RS: Well I think the Canadian contingent put it forward at our first plan meeting. I don’t recall whether it was actively discussed at the Remington Farms thing, but I think it was when we were in a more intimate setting with those state people or whatever it was that wrote the plan and I can remember uh you, George and Bob Andrews both explaining your concept of a Joint Venture that had been, I don’t know whether it had came from some other business attempt or other kind of stuff; but it seemed to just click with people as a natural, right from beginning. I will say that I’m not sure if Joint Ventures went about it the way we all expected the first time we talked about it, they found different ways to get it done but uh… 11
DH: Well I think the fact that…that we had already developed…the 34 designated areas as priority areas, to get a better handle and being able to massage those areas better, it’s…logical to put in to some kind of package so that they would…so that we could basically handle them.
RS: We…haven’t talked about that much but there is a map in that first plan, with those geographic areas mapped, and that was a really important step, when we defined on a geographical basis what the areas looked like to us and kind of tried to prioritize where we were going to go; that was a big jump, some people didn’t like it because their favorite area wasn’t as high a priority, but it was a mechanism by which we move forward, it was vastly important.
HN: And it also served as the basis for selecting the first five in the U.S. and the first two in Canada, but getting back to the terminology, I spoke (unclear, someone clearing throat) in the interview yesterday. And my recollection is that…I think we had a program review committee in Ottawa and there were a few of us present at that and uh at dinner that night the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Director General of the Canadian Wildlife Service and some of us that were at the table talked about this further, and “How are we going to get all this done? There must be some mechanisms that we can adopt that’ll help us” and somebody said “Oh, the first think we should do is adopt a Joint Venture principal, it’s working in industry, working in the corporate world. Why wouldn’t it work for this?”
GF: The main differenc, of course, is we needed to avoid a setting up independent cooperations, so we wanted to find a way of establishing a partnership without establishing all of the legal liabilities and stuff around, not for profit cooperations, all over the place cuz none of us could imagine doing that so, we came up with the Joint Venture mechanism, which seems to have worked based on what’s happened in the last 20 years.
HN: …It worked because it became a ground project level application (unclear) implementation process. All of the interested stake holders were invited to the table and they could bring to the table what they were able and little by little it began to develop the framework for a given Joint Venture and including the funding (unclear).12
BS: Now let’s talk about the biology for just a minute, as the planned evolved that, the first year from ’84 to ’85 the first writing in seven months, what discussion was held regarding the population goals; breeding population verses fall flight, were there any discussions as to which is the best (unclear) as a goal for the North American Plan?
RS: Well, yes there were uh you recall that we decided early on that the existence of all of the species plans and Flyways plans and other things was an existing framework that we shouldn’t try to duplicate. And so when we charged the technical folks, in then my office, the Migratory Bird Office, to come back to us with the specifics, with the list of species and all of these things. We charged them to adopt whatever the goals were in active species plans and…we had just pick something that was convenient and recognizable and that’s where our beginning lists came from.
RH: (Unclear) if I remember, primarily focused on geese as opposed to ducks, ducks came a little harder and a little later, mallard I guess was the first one that really got the treatment that all the ducks deserved.
BS: Mention again, as we did in one of the other interview processes, what was the connection with the population goals and habitat goals…how did the habitat goals…
RS: We…
BS: …come forward?
RS: We asked for input from the technical staff and both Canadian and U.S. and state people all wrestled with that. It was primarily the federal folks making this first cut to advise us and then was reviewed later. And it wasn’t an attempt to be precise, it was an attempt to make a judgment based on what we knew about habitat, which was pretty general…and put that out as a benchmark to try to sustain those population levels from the 1970’s, which we had somewhat arbitrary chosen as a kind of gold standard; if we can get back to this level and sustain it, this would be a good thing. It’s really just about as fundamental as that. And there was some really interesting little sidelights, I can remember Bob Andrews saying, “Well you know, if you only had 50,000 mallards left and they concentrated in few areas, people could go see all the mallards they ever needed to see, but what we’re really trying to do here is sustain the kind of waterfowl use, hunting and recreation that we have dispersed across the landscape. So we gotta bigger job to do because we wanna try and reach those loftier goals.” 13
DH: I think, yea the ‘70’s…was the goal for…reaching the objective in waterfowl numbers and the problem then is how do you relate that back to what was present in terms of habitat and we just didn’t have as big of handle on that as we would have liked, but as Rollie says you have to start some where.
RS: And we talked openly about the fact that…a responsible goal to satisfy an interested public, was basically to try…not to just reach a certain level but to dampen the amplitude that we knew would come; we acknowledged openly that ducks would still rise and fall affected by climate and things like that we’re never be able to control and so we had to set some goals but have a realistic expectation of what that would mean.
BS: And if we were to accomplish those acre goals that would keep that amplitude within a reasonable
RS: Right.
BS: …level of fluctuation.
RS: Right.
HN: Like you said it had to be in a reasonable approach, a reasonable perspective, one you could support based on what was known. But with looking back now, uh seems to me you know that was one of the real fortuitous events as the plan was developed; was establishing those population goals. And for the ones that they could do the best job with, because today they still serve as a benchmark for where things are headed, what we should be doing.
BS: So the final, the first basic final draft came out in, according to Dick Yancey, in June of 1985, went our for review and comment and I’m sure that there was a lot of comments; do you know, remember what time the a final draft of that was then sent up to powers that be in the Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada and in the Department of Interior for it to get the higher level blessings? Do you recall any…was that an easy process or did that just, they took the technicians word for it and stamped it?
GF: Uh…it’s called the final… the final….negotiations were in February of 1985 as I recollect, prior to the consultation document going…
RS: ’86.
GF: No…’85…’85 was when we had our meeting, first meeting in Indigo Island and got a document ready to go out to the public, in both Canada and the United States, for 14
consultations. Um. in June…probably a good date for when it actually hit the street. We knew at that time that we had problems in certain areas, already. I recollect, for example, that Ducks Unlimited, Incorporated was not happy with some of the…some of the elements of the plan. I think in part because of a misunderstanding that governments would try to take over land management issues, which is in their area, and there was also some concerns about the wording regarding harvest. So I remember Jim Patterson and others going down to Louisiana to meet some people from Ducks Unlimited, Inc. to talk about that. And we talked with various NGO’s and the interests Ag. Departments in some of the providences…viewed prairie ducks as being flying rats that ate grain and were of no use to anything, so that felt that if we were going to launch a program to increase the number of flying rats, that we needed to have compensation built right into the plan. Um and this went up to higher levels of government, so uh in the case of, coming up with a…set of comments that we could take back to the U.S. I don’t think that the process, or the difficulties mostly within the bureaucracy of Environment Canada, it was dealing with the (unclear) of Canadian interests that felt that this plan was going to affect them. And ultimately we went back with a small list of issues to Indigo Island again in 1986, which included familiar issues now, there was feeling that we were way too ambitious; particularity with respect to the money. Um we explicitly got from our northern constitutes the fact that we not done very well with sea ducks, um there was those people that felt we dealt with too much harvest and those that felt that we didn’t do enough with harvest. But by 1986 we were able to…we had a package of comments that we ready to go back and talk to the U.S. one more time about.
HN: And to add to that, it’s my recollection that you know as this was surfaced through the different levels of the Fish and Wildlife Service, through the regions and other interested groups; …we had a directorate meeting, I believe it was in like maybe January early February of ’86 where the final copy supposedly was circulated and I remember the Director at that stage saying “ This looks like the final document gentlemen, speak now or forever hold your peace, cuz this is going to go forward.” And I suspected it was also on the agenda at the International Meeting and the council meetings that uh the North American…
GF: (unclear) yea in ’85 for sure it was. 15
RS: That was in fact there was meetings each year at the Internationals meeting where, as I recall, Ron Lambertson spoke for the Service about the progress and the rest of if and kind of put it in front of the Executive Committee of International and asked them to take this very seriously because we were at decision points and all of that.
DH: Ready for signature.
RS: And I think George is right in talking about the changes that were made in ’85 gradually after we had the first draft out on the streets, things we had talked about but not yet confronted the issue of the need for Canadians to be able to offer compensation to farmers because that was a hot political issue and they were very clear about that too (unclear) I don’t think. You know we worked through a number of those kinds of things with this feedback to try to keep the core of this together and go ahead. The part that I recall, very strongly, is when the plan was signed in ’86 in May, there was a period between that February time when there as open discussion and the May signing where issues between the countries of a political nature came up and it was sort of, it got up into a realm that was beyond normal resource management channels, there were serious questions that came up from the Interior Department and from our Congressional Appropriators about “where do you think you’re going to get their money, this money and how could you sign a document that we interpret as saying, committing to expenditures before they’re appropriated”; and so subsequent negotiations had to occur where Susan Lambson, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary under Bill Horn, who was the Assistant Secretary at that in Interior, uh went to Canada with…Jack, the international president, Jack Barrymen, and they went thru this thing line by line and they were, Susan of course was instructed which words had to come out, which phrases had to come out that indicated a commented of money that wasn’t there and that kind stuff and there was some fairly difficult negotiations that had dragged on for weeks and people became pretty exasperated down at the working level and were ready to say “the hell with this thing, if the politicians won’t let us do this, then we’re not going to do it” but they stuck to it and they made the compromises and everybody swallowed hard and excepted them because they really didn’t (unclear) until the effect of what we were laying out as trying to do.
GF: I remember the day that we got notification that your management board was not happy with the techs because the way it was, the way it came to us is we receive the 16
galilees for the print and they amendments were in there and we hadn’t been notified that (unclear, laughing), we discovered them as we went though the galilees. I still remember Jim Patterson going up and down the walls.
BS: So it got to the point where it was accepted in, by parties in both sides, you mentioned DU one time, that there was some consultation with DU. At what point did the negotiating committee bring in the interest of the many NGO’s that are now supporting the plan? Was DU the only NGO or were there others that were consulted and…
RS: Well my recollection is that came about more informally through…Jack Grebe and Dick Yancey and through some outreach, it wasn’t just to the states uh Keith Harmon at the Wildlife Management Institute was involved in tracking this as it went along and had a (unclear) of people he talked to. The DU issue came up and George I can’t recall whether it was after the first draft was public in ’85 or it was actually after it was signed in ’86.
GF: It was ’85 I think.
RS: Well…
GF: I can remember May…
RS: I can’t recall who went but I was involved and I went to the Chicago airport and we met Peter Coors, who was president of DU, and the fundamental concern they were bringing to us then, and this is why I think could be a separate meeting than one you’re talking about; the fundamental concern was not harvest issues, it wasn’t anything but money. And they had interpreted the plan laying out all these goals with some dollar figures that were large and all that, as a suggestion that they, DU, should give their money to a government body to make decisions about where it went and as soon as we established that that was their concern we were able very quickly to say, “no that’s not the case, what we’ve tried to do is have the technical people from both countries set out objectives and goals and we’re going to try and find ways to jointly work to achieve those.” And they said literally “Oh you mean you don’t expect us to give our control over our money to the government” and we said “absolutely not.” And it was kind of like somebody pulled a light bulb and all of a sudden it was more positive. 17
*DH or RH: And uh I think that was where Joint Ventures came in, is these various partners, these NGO’s…at whatever level, begin to migrate towards those Joint Ventures and pretty soon they were motivated and they could see what the benefits would be to that collectively they could do a much better job than one individual by themselves.
HN: But that part of the sales package we had to develop in the implementation process.
[Various members of panel agreeing by saying “yea”]
BS: So (unclear of name hear) from Secretary of Interior in the Fish and Wild, in U.S. and Tom McMillan was the Minister of Environment in Canada, did they sign this in a big ceremony or was this done just you know kind of through their offices and…
RS: No it, well they were both in the Interior Department at one time cuz I stood there and watched them sign the documents and I don’t know whether we had a related signing in Canada.
GF: I think it was just (unclear, talking at same time).
RS: Maybe it was just this one and you know it was signed as a firm agreement between, not the two governments as much as the two secretarial levels who had charge over natural resources for their government as, I think people interpret it as a statement of intent, to go do this together, not a treaty, not a law and technically not bonding other than by the good will between these two entities. In other words they accepted the responsibility and signed off on it.
BS: And looking through documentation, the next thing I noticed was a, I believe an August meeting at Remington Farms, of the Plan Committee. And so in between the May and July or August of that summer, apparently the international appointed members for the Plan Committee, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Canadian Wildlife, the Providences and yaw came together for the first meeting; uh it was chaired by, I believe it was Walt Stieglitz, who was at that time…was the Associate Director in Washington, and um Don Minnich, who was at that meeting, um Red I think you were there.
RH: Yes.
BS: Dick, I think you were there.
DH: Right.
BS: George…
GF: No I wasn’t. 18
BS: You were not there.
GF: I was reprieved.
BS: Okay. Jim Patterson, Bob Bailey, trying to think of the other names.
HN: I was, was…
BS: Bob Andrews, Dennis Surratt, Berry Meadows I think was there from…
RH: New Brunswick.
BS: New Brunswick.
RS: And that was a… I think that’s important thing, we were talking about that over lunch, um…the fact that a deliberate choice was made to form a plan, oversight committee that would be viewed as the keeper of the plan itself; that statement of goals and objectives and measures of how much achievement we’re making towards these goals and objectives, and involve only the state, federal and providential agencies in the two countries that had regulatory and management responsibility for those resources. That the plan committee itself was not viewed as the public form through which all interest would be…would be served. And that was different than the way lots of committees had been formed in other contexts and it seems to have worked. Now the…the second committee that was envisioned was an implementation body between the countries, which would be where the private interests came into it and an attempt was made to join forces to get things done to move the plan ahead.
BS: So if you were to look at 1986 and early ’87, the first two, three meetings of the North American Plan Committee, what kind of progress occurred during that time? What, what was it all administrative, was it looking at how you get the Joint Ventures running, what kind of things came up at those meetings? George,..kick that off.
GF: Well I think the next important meeting was actually in September, at the international, where the plan was essentially now in the market place and…and international…Gary Myers was the president, as I recollect, of the International that year and he and a number of other people were very enthusiastic about this fact that this new plan had come…into being and it started to be a talk at that meeting of first step projects; and I don’t know whether the first step project idea came at your earlier plan committee, but it certainly was on the floor…
[Someone in background saying “at the international”] 19
GF: of the international as being, essentially a way to pilot the notion of getting…getting money to…Canada as flag ships projects but also into the states and so that the, the outcome of the plan would become immediately visible. And I think that, that was really key because that was the step that turned…well we went from the plan uh planning mode to implementation mode. And, if you think of it, it was a very fast transition and that transition I think established some momentum and laid the groundwork for what was to come in the next critical three or four years.
RH: And I think there was a mad hawk committee of international (unclear) North American Plan implementation at that time, and as you pointed out, the main thrust of that was the get the dollars flowing and get things on the ground so they could demonstrate that the thing is really going to work.
RS: We had some obstacles to overcome immediately that come up in mild discussion during the writing of the plan, but as soon we started talking about the very specific issue of using U.S. dollars from whatever source, in Canada on the ground, we had people in the Congress uh appropriators, particularly in their staffs, we had folks on the subsequently the…National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which was newly formed, took some steps and became a real force in both advancing it’s own cause and getting us started because they were free as a small cooperate entity to take the money and spend it in Canada. But…I’m trying to remember your Reno based gentlemen who was on the board and who owned a piece of one the California duck clubs and some of these guys were our friends in waterfowl management, but they were pretty particular about the bean counting in this whole thing. They wanted to know who was going guarantee and how are they going to guarantee the U.S. interests and how the money was used and tracked and that we really got the benefit from it. And that was put up as almost an insurmountable obstacle, at first, and had to be overcome; that’s why this chapter that unfolds with the foundation and with states going to get some money because everyone reasoned if we can’t just ask for money, we gotta show that we’re willing to put some forward and the states, that’s when they stepped forward with their first step program.
HN: And it was kind of a transition period too, you know once the plan was signed and everybody was anxious to move into implementation and to spend the first dollars and I recall and I didn’t get into the Directorship of it until ’87, but during that period…there 20
were different kinds of meetings but you know again Chip Collins was the Executive Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and it’s true he spent a lot time trying to help orchestrate the best steps forward and to provide initial funding. And there are a number of people like that across the country that helped us and some point they all outta be recognized.
RS: Yea people behind the scenes, Jim Range was involved in getting Senator Bob Caston to get some money earmarked from an usual source, some sort of international funding base, that allowed that first step to be taken to spend money in Canada and that was done through the foundation and then quickly after that the first step stuff involving state money than subsequently matched by Ducks Unlimited, you know became more complex; but all this was an effort to show good will and begin move money in the right direction and show that we could prepare for its, its tracking and use and accounting.
RH: It led up to the passage of the act too, which really made the…funneling of U.S. dollars into Canada a little more uh…
*BS: If you look at the track record in terms of the plan committee minutes, in ’86 and ’87, there really not much actually happening in terms of on the ground or money that was flowing etcetera, but there had to be a tremendous amount of talking behind the scene, because these, the laws that led up to the act led up to the…Senator Mitchell and when he got the, foundation was allowed put money in internationally; that all had to take many, many months probably the ’86, ’87, I don’t know if I’ll be able (unclear) all that information out but I agree it would be great to be able to find the names of everybody that had some part in making that happen.
*DH: And a lot of this was organizational effort too, (unclear) it had to be. And I don’t believe the North American Plan Committee really settled into its true role until about the late ’87, ’88 and the members might have changed a bit and became firm but there were six members on each side, from each country and…finally that settled into place and they scheduled regular meetings and…
BS: Well this basically, I think maybe, brings us up to the end of this session, which is late ’87, when there was a decision made that there will be a U.S. Office to mange the plan, there will be a Canadian Office to manage the plan. I believe Canada, George, 21
came up with money dedicated to Joint Venture and that was maybe about eighty, late ’87.
GF: Probably ’88 but Jim (unclear, talking at same time) will be able to speak to that more accurately
BS: And…so I think we’re at a point where we can call this panel to a halt and reorganize for taking it from roughly late ’87 thru ’88 through ’90 where they’re just everyday there seemed to be more and more happening. But, uh if we can think about this a little bit more and try to pull in other names of other people and maybe eventually pass this out for others to review, we can complete the full picture of some of this; I’ll say it a little bit fuzzy at this point, of who did what, when. But we know there were a lot of people involved, joining in, in partnerships; they believed in the basic goals, the vision of the North American Plan and I think it had a solid, solid start with the works you folks and your partners did during this period. Thank you very much.
[Causal talk, someone said “This is the model for the award, for the Canvas Back Award” 22
Key:
DS
Dave Sharp
BS
Bob Streeter
KR
Ken Rick
JM
Jim McQuaig
HN
Harvey Nelson
JC
John Cornely
*not sure who is talking or if particular person marked as talking is correct
Ok, in this particular panel uh what we’re going to discuss is the time period from after the plan was signed by the two signator countries in 1986 leading up to the up the early days in probably 1987 or so. And we’re going to look at the period of time from then until almost when…the North American Wetland Conservation Act was signed in late in 1989 to beginning of 1990. It was an exciting time all across North America, for waterfowl, as we had a plan…we had a lot of work to do to implement the plan. It took a long time in coming but there were a lot of people ready to implement what was in place. It had a lot of supporters, it had a lot of partners, it was a massive undertaking in both countries at that time and there was a lot of communications that were going up and down, crossways uh trying to do the best job we could with implementing the plan that we had in front of us. With me I have a panel that I’d like to introduce to you. First of all Ken Rick, who worked…long time employee with the state of New York, was one of the original plan committee members; he’s here to talk about that period of time with us. Next to him is Bob Streeter, Bob Streeter…in addition to being a long time friend; Bob is also a long term Service employee. Bob and I worked, went to work in Minneapolis to work with Harvey, 1988, Bob was instrumental many phases of the plan and happy to have Bob here with us today. Next to Bob is Harvey Nelson, Harvey is probably the most long-term person that we had that we were able to draw in for some of the history; a long term Service employee, first Executive Director of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan Office in Minneapolis and I worked for Harvey in Minneapolis at that time. Next is John Cornely, who is the Chief of Migratory Birds in Denver, U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee. John was working with several of the Joint Ventures at one time, with the technical committees and implementation in the field and had been a long time worker with North American actives in Region 6 in the Fish and Wildlife Service. Next to John is Jim McQuaig, who was the…also the first Director of the Canadian implementation office in Canada, a counterpart to Harvey in terms of what was going on 23
in Canada. So that’s the panel that we have to go through this period of time. Uh I kind of like to start about the time that the U.S. and Canadian offices, for implementation of the North American Plan, were set up at the end of probably ’87 coming into ’88 when a lot of that was coming together; but I turn first to Harvey and ask Harvey, from the time that the plan was signed through ’87 and coming into 1988, what was happening within the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of administratively setting up an office for implementation and ultimately you would get that job as the Executive Director and pull together a team in Minneapolis to begin to work on the implementation phases, but what was going on in the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of getting ready to implement this North American Plan?
HN: Well very quickly, Dave, you know I was Regional Director in Minneapolis for the North Central Region at the time, and because I had long involvement in the earlier stages on the organizational development of the plan and such; I attended a lot of those meetings and sort of became a spokesperson, I guess, for the Directorate level of the Service at that time. So this is kind of a long story, but I was all set to retire in 1987 and as the plan unfolded and then implementation process came to the forefront, I agreed to stay another five years and help implement the plan. And that’s how I worked into that position, specifically, but more particularity that’s another reason why we started in Minneapolis because I was located there. And we felt that the first few years of the implementation of the new plan could be done from almost anywhere and why not do it right there. So I just moved down the hall and set up another office and hired some of you guys to come or transfer down there and things got started. But, uh, there was a big sales job, big communications job that remained to be done and we talked about that in some of the other interviews here. But those of you, who were there, including myself, spent just a lot of time, while working, traveling within the Service, within the 50 states and other areas, with the Canadians and their program, um carrying the message and trying to develop the cooperative approach that was needed. So we logged a lot of miles and a lot of time doing that and I think within the Fish and Wildlife Service as a whole, there was a new spirit developed about you know this is something we gotta see through, this is something we gotta get done and that became reflected in the early reallocation of funds, accusation funds, within the organization to divert more money into the North American 24
Plan, until there was a more secure funding base…to help look at other things that could be done on private as a supplement to help the North American Plan; so there was a lot of new things, a lot of new support developed within the Fish and Wildlife Service. And we saw the same thing happening within the states, within the four Flyway Councils and the International Association and all the other NGO’s that we worked with.
DS: Bob, at that time you were Harvey’s assistant and taken on this new job of implementation, Harvey talked about the communications aspects. What were the major jobs that we had to take on right as our office came together and to try to nurture this North American Plan into something on the ground; what were the kinds of activities that we were dealing with on a day to day basis to help us come down the road, in addition to communications, but where were we going, where did you want to go?
BS: Well I don’t think it was where we wanted to go, it’s where we had…to help the partners go with the program. Harvey was doing a yeomen’s job of getting out and…information out to people in the plan and had to help with that too. There was a need for internal communications, within the Joint Ventures and the U.S. and in Canada to let people, at the more local level, know what was going on in other places, so we had developed an internal communications program. There was an awards program that came out, early on; we needed to recognize people that did good work so that was something that we developed. We had to cheerlead to the Joint Ventures, as they were developing Joint Ventures plans, that they needed to have their goals and objectives be quantitative and even more on the ground than what the general plan was, in terms of its overall population goals and habitat goals…
[Side 1 of tape ended here, pick up on side 2]
*DS or BS: And so it was broadly communications, cheerleading, providing some level of organization, not control, but trying to work so that the Joint Ventures in Canada and the U.S. were kind of going the same path, they weren’t diverging away from the supporting the goals of the North American Plan. We developed a really close working relationship with the staff at Harvey’s office and the staff in Canada and with Joint Ventures staffs; it was a just this growing feeling of partnership and that we’re all had a greater calling to help this North American Plan through. The implementation board was an important part the first year, they were had been talked about and the NGO’s were 25
talked about in what their role in the plan was and there had to be some organization given to the, to helping the implementation board get going; and they developed I think they started with 16 NGO’s and they moved to 18 as they brought in a couple of ag. organizations. This was all during ’88 and ’89 and there was no set timeline on these, there were just so many things to do like that to provide some organization to the North American Plan implementation; the same time, trying to keep up with what was going on Joint Ventures. They were starting to put projects on the ground with various monies that were coming forward and they were building their partnerships and so we’re trying not get ahead of them but keep up with them and acknowledge all the things that were going on good in what you see in one Joint Venture, try to maybe transfer that information and idea to another Joint Venture; and I’m just not talking in the U.S. it crossed the border almost seamlessly so those are some of the things I recall that we really focused on that first, probably the first year of the office implementation.
HN: Let me add a couple of things to that, that come to mind at the moment, um first of all it was important that the Joint Venture level, and when they started the first five in the U.S. and the first two in Canada, to develop an organizational concept, at least, that would be somewhat similar; and that was the establishment of the Joint Venture management boards, so there was that similarly between them. And I think that was a real good step in the right direction early on because that built some creditability in the program and it identified some key people in the different Joint Ventures and the different states that became the leaders, so it was their program it wasn’t necessarily just our program any more. And then at the Washington level, we formed the U.S. implementation, Implementation Board, for a couple of reasons. Here we’re all working, daily, mingling with all the other NGO’s and different organizations at the Washington level, but not all was pointed in the same direction. And they weren’t all involved in the North American…the North American Waterfowl Plan support base to the same degree. So we had some discussion about that but the guys from the International (unclear), and the Wildlife Management Institute, so any way, from between Gary Myers and Larry Yawn, the late Larry Yawn, and a few other people, over coffee one day we said “We gotta organize this implementation board and get it operating because then we gotta a good reason for bringing all these folks to the same table and talk about the North 26
American Plan, not a whole bunch of other things” so we did that. And I guess I kind of headed that organization, initially, and then…Ducks Unlimited…
**Someone saying Matt Connelly**
HN: Matt Connelly from Ducks Unlimited chaired it for a couple of years. And then lets see, Rollie Sparrowe was chair for a period of time [someone speaking in background] and it eventually more less outlived its usefulness but we accomplished what we set out to do. And I think one of the major things was that we got some of the agriculture groups, on the Washington scene, more directly involved in the plan. And other organizations…it had just been peripheral until then, it turned out very strong supporters.
DS: Jim in Canada, at that time, you heard Harvey and Bob talk about some of the earlier implementation activities in the U.S. side and I assume that things were beginning to happen in Canada at the same time. What was going on at, in Canada, with implementation there, the two habitat Joint Ventures, obviously we also had two species Joint Ventures that were set up with the original signing of the plan, the black duck and the artic goose; but could you describe what was actually going on in Canada at that time and…from an implementation standpoint?
JM: Well I’ll start with the Canadian Wildlife Service; the Service had been very much focused on putting together the plan and working together with the U.S. partners to get the plan in position and also then began to focus on getting it approved through the cabinet process. And when we arrived with a signed document, we realized that our Regional Directors, who had been so strongly supportive of this whole process throughout, were now going to turn their focus into the Joint Ventures. They were going to be looking at how to put this thing on the ground and that headquarters needed to change gears and to establish, much like the U.S. office in Minneapolis at that time and then Washington, a Canadian office that basically maintained the headquarters responsibility for coordination, communications, and liaison with the United States. And so what happened first was that Jim Patterson, who is Director of the Migratory Birds branch and responsible so much as we’ve heard all day for many of the things in the development, brought in a gentlemen named Lee Munn and he came in as the coordinator of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan; there was some overlap before Jim moved on out of the Canadian Wildlife Service. Um Lee Munn then, as coordinator, 27
began to assemble a staff and I was one of the first persons that joined that staff and that goes back to a long relationship with Lee that he had been my boss in the Lands Directorate of Environment Canada. And um then Lee moved on and retired and I had the responsibility then of establishing an office, very much like Harvey and I became Harvey’s counterpart, as first of all coordinator of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan for Canada and then later on they actually held a competition, which I had to compete for and won, for the Director of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And so we then began to establish a staff the brought together communications people, brought together the various aspects of the Canadian Wildlife Service and perform the headquarters functions and very much like Bob was describing…a coordination function, making sure that the Joint Ventures were reading from the same hymn book, working on the same page, establishing themselves as they needed to establish themselves but not in some kind of a rigid formula; we tried to avoid very strongly the establishment of any kind of set of rules. So we got the office and I, if I had to identify one job that we had to do as the central office of the Canadian Wildlife Service in those very first years, was establish a trust. We built a huge amount of trust with our people in the development of the plan and overcome many of the barriers, as been explained in earlier panels, but that trust had to now go to where it really counted; the money and that everyone was going to get from the plan what they had anticipated getting from the plan and what the plan called for them to get. And that was a difficult process to establish and that happened over time and you know we were still having doubters, even in those first years, even after the signing of it, people saying “not a dime will ever come across the border” and these…that was still being said when I was sitting on the plan committee and we had to prove that not to be correct, and that’s where these first step projects that were so important came in because we hit the ground fast. Elsewhere in Canada, in terms of the Joint Ventures, they began to come together and all of a sudden the pressure was on them because the pressure was there, that they, there was money being gathered and there was money available and they then had to turn around and take all these wonderful goals, that were established at a Joint Venture level, and translate those into on the ground projects that could be delivered and be explained and written up in such a fashion that someone would be willing to put money towards them; 28
and that is by no means an easy job. And those people who had been doubters wouldn’t have put a lot of effort into that until such time that as it became obvious they had to do so. And there was a big scramble, it was…it wasn’t easy putting those first step projects together in such a fashion that they could go the International and go to people like Ken and the various states that came along and have something concrete to put on.
KR: I think a particular value of establishing those two offices, was there a demonstration to the Flyways and to the Joint Ventures that there was a federal commitment to the North American and they were well under staffed at the federal level.
DS: Ken can I go further down that road, we have the Canadian offices in place and from your perspective, in terms of the plan committee, now you have this implementation arm, we have a plan, you’re sitting on the plan committee, things are going along well; what was the role, how did the role change of the plan committee with having the two offices in place that you were the keeper of the plan, you were the one that your committee was the group that was the keeper of the plan, but now you had these implementation offices, you had Joint Ventures beginning to form, how did the role of the plan committee really change in these first years in terms of oversight, what it was looking at and trying to look ahead to keep the North American viable?
KR: Probably the major change was we stopped worrying about where we were going to find this initial funding to get the whole thing off the ground to more of an oversight role. Harvey mentioned the structure of the Joint Ventures; I recall we had to finally establish some kind of a guideline of what to call, that they would be called management boards because there was a variety of names across…across the board on these Joint Ventures. On the other hand, though, the committee and the plan was flexible enough to allow some differences and recognition that there had to be some differences. I think the…particular value of the plan was that the implementation on the ground wasn’t to be; well the implementation on the ground was to be implementation, not a lot of further planning, but actually getting something done. And I know this oversight role that the…board, the two offices (unclear) did that quite well because from the Joint Venture perspective and the Waterfowl Council, we never felt like we were being directed or you know ruled by your offices; it was more gentle guidance and prodding and so on, so it worked effectively. But I think that was the major change…at the beginning the committee was quite 29
concerned where we were going to find the funding because I remember the Canadian, Bob Andrews in particularity, would bring to each of the early meetings “Look I’ve staffed up, I’ve committed to my government, where’s the money, where’s it going to come from?” And that the beginning there we had no idea until the first steps were organized and money actually started to flow.
DS: But it was clear that we wanted to hit the ground, not only hit it, we wanted to turn it and we wanted to show people that we were actually making progress and I recall the urgency of putting the shovel in the dirt and making things happen out there and I think there was a strong will to get that done very quickly because that was some how proof to the world we not only had a plan but we could turn dirt with that plan and we can begin to pull partners together from all sources. I want just talk a little bit about partnerships, one of the unique things with the North American is partnerships and I heard Harvey talk about partnerships at the national level, one of the things that was going to happen, from my perspective with the North American, was partnerships were going to begin to change, become different, become very plastic at each Joint Venture level, some of the strong partners were at the national level but they were also at the board at the Joint Venture level. So we began to meld partnerships in many different ways, both nationally and all the way down to the ground level. And one of the most unique things was the North American and it’s ability to do that through the Joint Ventures and through the upper levels. How did this all come about in terms of partnerships, how…who came up with the concept and putting these partners together and how you built a machine to sort of help waterfowl from various sources? I don’t know where I’m going at with this whole idea but partnerships had been part of the North American, how did we pull all of this together, with getting the partners? I don’t know if anybody wants to take the lead on this one, Bob you have always had some thoughts about partners, but this is one of the things that made the North American unique.
BS: When I joined Harvey’s team in the spring of ’88, I think the concept of partnerships was already there. And it was part of the basic premise of the plan, you know, one of the strengths of the plan was it had specific goals, population goals and habitat objectives. Another one is built on the strength of partnerships; no one organization can do it on its own. And the third thing was it wasn’t highly structured, it was open and flexible to 30
change and adapt as it went along. So the partnership thing, as far as I knew, was always a basic concept of the plan and the people that really put it into place were the Joint Ventures, where they started bringing people to the table. Another partnership was the First Step Program, which we might talk about and I’ll turn that back over to Ken because he’s the man that laid the first $100,000 on the table and challenged the state partners to move money.
KR: True! I was thinking of there was some experience with partnerships before…cuz we already had a working partnership with DU, so there was groundwork and then as the Joint Ventures started taking a look at a landscape level, some of the additional partners needed to make it work became more and more obvious. The farmer and the forester were actually managing the wildlife so we knew we had to get those people involved if we were going to work on private lands, that type of thing. So it wasn’t the concept was valuable but it wasn’t that we never had partnerships before, so the basic groundwork for the partnership was some of the existing.
*Someone saying “wasn’t new, it was just putting them together and *
KR: and expanding way beyond what we had…
JM: The key, I think to the partnerships, was that we had broken down barriers at administrated levels, between states and providences and federal governments and non-governmental organizations and that experience just made us a lot more open to the opening up to other partners and that combined with our understanding and realization that the impossible job of doing this by ourselves was going to make it absolutely necessary to be open to anyone who wanted to come to the table and all they had to do was accept the goals and objectives of the plan and be willing to work with others. And that way they would come on and we would…the way we put it a lot was that, the partnerships made the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Everybody had jurisdictions, everybody had certain amount certain of money, everybody had certain amount of expertise but together we had all the expertise we needed, all the jurisdiction we needed and in the end, because of the good will and the turning of the soil as you said, the proof that we’re doing these kinds of things; the money was there and these things came together and because of partnerships that those things came together and it was not something that should be at all downplayed, it’s the heart of the North American Plan. 31
Without it, it doesn’t work and that’s what everybody else is trying to emulate and trying to emulate the success.
HN: I think a couple of other things happened too, while all this was going on. First of all you know when the plan was first purposed, it was six million acres that’s going to cost $1 ½ billion and back in those days that was a pretty staggering figure and that’s why we had all the nay sayers out there saying “this will never happen, it’s just another plan” so we had to get over that crisis. And the Joint Ventures were, they were a good vehicle for addresses that particular issue. And then furthermore the Joint Ventures, not only brought all these interested stakeholders to the table, but there was also a plan at every Joint Venture in their first year what they were going to do; so they started to see action in the first year or two, nobody was waiting. And it was sort of…accepted fact you couldn’t wait.
KR: Translated that billion-dollar figure down into some manageable bites too, when you get down into the Joint Ventures.
DS: Doable chucks, things that you could demonstrate and one of the things that I think that that did was prove that those big dollars that were being talked about, that nobody could conceive of, and that all of a sudden we’re actually within reach and potentially there could actually be spent to the effect that we had purposed that they would be in the plan.
BS: I’d like to give a real specific example that sticks in my mind of a partnership on the ground and of course as we, as Harvey and I and others toured around to these Joint Ventures to see what they’re doing, they wanted to show us what they’re doing. I remember standing at a dock down in Louisiana one day when they’re waiting for a boat to brought up to the launch there and it was a little bit late and the state people were kind of worried about you know “are we going to get off on time” and the, there was a TNC Nature Conservancy Biologist were there because they were going to take us out and show us their project. Well here, finally, came a federal truck with a state trailer and a federal boat on it; the federal trailer had had a bearing out that night or the night before so they had to come up with a state trailer, put the federal boat on it, for the Nature Conservancy and…the Louisiana state agency personal to drive out there. I mean it didn’t matter whose equipment it was, we’re all on a job and we’re going to make it, 32
make this happen and that just the attitude that just grew and grew and grew out in the field, whether it was in Canada or in lower Mississippi Valley or California etc.; this is the spirit of partnership and we’re going to make this thing happen and we’re all going to contribute to it and it’s going to be more than this, you know the sum will be more than the parts.
JC: There was another thing that occurred right in this same period of time that I don’t think was originally intended, maybe, to be related to the North American Waterfowl Management Plan but I came to Denver in 1988 and the first coordinator for the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture was in place, but also the initial pilot Private Lands Program in Region 3 and Region 6 was just under way, in fact my entire budget was out in the field starting that Private Lands Program. And Ken mentioned and others have mentioned the, you know, the private land owners and the foresters and so on that…we all now have seen involved in these Joint Ventures partnerships, at least some of the Joint Ventures. And so right at this same period of time, when the first Joint Ventures were starting, was this Private Lands Program and some states starting some private lands work that maybe they hadn’t been doing before and especially that has turned out to be a tremendous partnership and implementation process for the Joint Ventures.
DS: Let’s shift gears just for a little bit and…a part of the history that’s always intrigued me was the logo of the North American, as you all recall when the first document was written and had the canvas back on the cover it sort of became the signal…the icon for the uh for the North American but soon it had a new logo and today when the new logo has shown, it has instant recognition; the North American logo has become one of the, the best well known logo’s that I’m aware of in the waterfowl field. Um Harvey, Jim if you two want to take a crack at it, could you talk about the logo and the change from the canvas back to the new logo; some of the thoughts behind that and because it is a very unique logo and uh maybe just to give us some idea of how that all came about.
HN: Well just let me start by saying that uh initially we looked for the best artwork there was and uh we came upon this photograph that was taken up at the Agassiz Refuge in Minnesota by one Herb Dill, now deceased, canvas back (unclear) with a (unclear) and it was an exceptionally good photo. And we sort of adopted that as the initial, not logo necessarily… 33
[Someone saying “symbol” in background]
HN: symbol of the plan. But then we realized we had to go beyond that and we looked at various ways to do that and we had had our communications people scratching up different designs and we went to the private sector and to graphic artists to get some illustrations and suggestions and uh I’m going to let Jim Pat, Jim take it from there.
JM: Harvey did the work and Harvey’s staff and people pulled together a series of potential logos that we could use and um we made the mistake of actually trying to do logo by committee and that does not work. [Some laughing by various members of panel] And we had gone through several meetings looking at different kinds of logos and Harvey and I went, I guess it was to the North American at the Omani Sheraton in Washington here or something and Harvey and I were really tired of it; it’s over, forget it, we don’t want to do this anymore. So we sat down in the lobby there and chose between two, we said this one or this one; one was a duck leaping up out of habitat and the other is the logo that we now know. And we decided on that one but we consulted with higher powers to be sure that it was ok; Harvey consulted with Gene and I consulted with Enea, our wives, and they liked it and that was it. And nobody argued with us and now that logo can be find from the far artic to…Mexico and I’ll tell you something, it’s the one thing that symbolizes to me the pride that I have in all of the things that the North American has accomplished, is when you can go all over North America and see that logo and laugh about how it came about.
*BS: Just to capture one other aspect of it, the artist that designed this logo from which we chose from, I don’t remember his name, but he’s the same person that designed the John Deer logo of the leaping deer of “Nothing runs like a Deer” um and the symbolism…the circle is “unity”. The wings touching, and I don’t know if you’re able to zoom on this little pin here that I have and that several of us have, the wings touching symbolize partnerships, the movement symbolizes action across the borders and then I think the final thing is it’s reflection in what one reflected in the other, which is water, wetlands. So all those things were, were the things that were embodied in this logo and it has held well over the 20 years.
HN: And it symbolizes unity.
BS: Yea, Yea. 34
DS: Great logo, it quite a story. Um Bob…
KR: I can assure you, as a committee member, we were please you made the decisions, (unclear, everyone laughing)
DS: Bob, Jim touched on a subject I like to go to next and that’s Mexico. And that he talked about the logo being seen from the arctic all way to Mexico and today (unclear) that’s a true story, it is. But tell us about Mexico, in terms of…getting quote “the plan” south of that border or south of our border into Mexico, getting Mexico on as a signator and then beginning to work in Mexico, which for the first time we were going to spread our wings to quote “the rest of North America” that up to this point we just hadn’t go to but tell us the story of Mexico and getting them involved.
BS: I’ll tell you what I recall of it and others can fill in here, there were many attempts and many, in many of the documents that recognize that Mexico had to be eventually a partner in this North American Waterfowl Plan; and even precursors to the North American Plan. Um Mexico was interesting, they had a lot of changes in the government and every time a director, be a counterpart to the national or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Canadian Wildlife Service, every time that director was changed, which sometimes was two and three times in a year, the entire staff was changed; right on down to secretary’s. So it was very difficult for anyone trying to maintain the continuity with somebody in Mexico to uh, that was a biologist or a leader there; they kept disappearing, if you will. At the time the North American Plan was signed, the first time Mexico was not ready to sign on and the powers that be that were contacted, they were aware of it but they were just not prepared to sign on for probably several reasons; politically and some financially, they didn’t have a lot of money to do work . A very strong director came in, her name was (unsure of how to spell name, Victoria Grazeilla Del la Garza) and she was involved with the Tripartite Agreement, which is an agreement among Canada, U.S. and Mexico on many different species of interest and there was a little bit of money in Canada and the U.S. to send to projects in Mexico. Um, through that process we approached her and she still had no interest in signing onto the North American Plan cuz it was too narrow, it was kind of a duck plan, ducks were not that all important in her, in her vision in Mexico. Um…we’re jumping ahead a little bit but the North American Wetlands Conservation Act was signed and it started putting money into Canada and 35
Mexico and a little bit more substantial money than $25,000 at a whack; we’re willing to put several million across the borders. Grazeilla came to a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina of the North American Wetlands Conservation Council, approximately 1992. There were several Canadian projects or I’m sorry, Mexican projects that were being considered at that time, they were funded, approved to be funding and she recognized that Mexico could gain a lot by signing onto the North American Plan and the partnerships that were being spawned out of that. And so in a little bar on a piece of napkin at the Charleston Airport, we wrote down the conditions under which she was willing to allow Canada or Mexico to sign on with Canada and the U.S. on the North American Plan. That was then followed up by you know letters and things back and forth, she was willing to appoint someone to work on the update for the 1994 plan and then Mexico became a signator to the 1994 plan.
DS: Ok.
HN: I guess the only I could, you know, add to that is that as Bob indicated, during our earlier discussions with them, uh they recognized the value of the plan and how it could be beneficial to Mexico, but because of other ongoing internal strife and other agreements that they were debating what their roles should be; they weren’t very comfortable at that stage, at least in my opinion, the people that we talked with about stepping forward and saying “Yes we’ll participate now.” There were many reasons for that as you perhaps indicated, but it kept the dialog open and I think that was the important thing; every chance we had, we made some trips down there, specifically about that. And then when they modified they the tripartite agreement at one stage, they felt that would be adequate for them to continue to…discussions with the U.S. and Canada. And they did that essentially up until the time she made the decision to sign on, which was a good stroke of business.
DS: Okay, we’re going to switch gears just a little bit and go into some of the technical aspects of implementation um I worked as a population specialist on the plan, Carl Madsen a counterpart of mine worked as a habitat specialist. Carl was busy trying to figure out a way to count acres and achievements that we were making with the North American Plan, we were turning lots of dirt in those days and we needed a real track record in terms of what we were doing and Carl was busy working on that. I was busy 36
looking at the population aspects, interpretation of those goals that were put into place. We had flyway management plans for geese and we were tracking their populations, um we had goals in there, which was the decade of the 1970’s, which serves our benchmark for ducks. But now people were asking harder questions and these questions had to do with the connectivity of these habitat efforts that we were making on the ground and what effect we would have on duck populations, waterfowl populations, down the road. As I was on the road and Harvey sent me with a pocket of airline tickets, and I was communicating the plan, one of the things I heard from our partners was “when will we see the results of our work? Can duck populations recover?” As you recall they were at virtually all time continental lows in ’85, we went through another series of regulatory restrictions in ’88, there was definite concern over the…level that we had duck populations at and then their ability to recover; if indeed we could put the habitat back on the land. I ran into countless numbers of people that said “Maybe ducks can never recover again, even if we were successful at putting all the habitat on the land” and so people wanted to see some accomplishments and so at that point under the direction of Harvey, I created the continental evaluation team and began to pull together technical experts from Canada and the U.S. to begin to look at the population aspects and the linkage, more importantly, of habitat to populations and that work continues to this day; probably one of the hardest things that we would ever do in terms of trying to link the populations and habitat. With that in mind, I guess my next question is to John Cornely and it gets back to some of the technical aspects. John at the field level you were involved with technical committees and several Joint Ventures and what was the thinking in those days in how to take those lofty goals out of the North American Plan, bring those into a Joint Venture, then put those on the ground and insure that indeed those activities were going to result in help to waterfowl. What was the thinking going on in those days and tech. committees?
JC: Well at the very beginning, you know, we really didn’t even attempt a direct linkage you know we had these partnerships forming. The first one I was involved with was a Prairie Pothole Joint Venture…the management board was forming as I moved into my new role as a Migratory Bird Coordinator and I was on the first technical committee and we were considered, still considered, the flag ship Joint Venture in the U.S. along with 37
the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture in Canada and one of the most critical areas that we need to work. Uh…remember what Rollie Sparrow said in one of the earlier interviews, at this period of time we were in a prolonged drought, populations were very low, Dave you just alluded to the, you know some of us, I was in discussions with you; there was a lot of, I was a little newer to this business, but a lot of folks had been around for a long time, were beginning to doubt whether, even if water came back, the populations were so low, would the ducks respond. Well, in a few years we found that they could respond very fast and very well if the habitat was there and that kind of kick started all of us. But what we were very fortunate in the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, because we had Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota that had been working on modeling the mallard life cycle. And they had also been piloting some landscape level evaluation tools and right at the time when our technical committee for the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture was established, …Dick Smith and others in the Fish and Wildlife Service said “it’s time for this research project to become operational” and it was up to Regions 3 and Region 6, in the middle of the country, to take over that process, originally designed to evaluate duck production on refuge land verses waterfowl production areas verses private lands because we didn’t have a good way to compare what was happening across the landscape on these different land jurisdictions. But the timing was just such that that became one of our, the best evaluation tools that we have to this date because we had, we have since the…probably late ‘80’s early ‘90’s we have sample plots throughout the five states in the U.S. where we have… hard, digitalized data on the exact wetlands…how many acres were in those plots. We also had folks go out there every year and do bird counts and do pair counts before that and we’ve had aerial video the recorded the water. We also had people spend hours and hours in county clerks offices and…putting down on maps land ownership; what was private land, what was state land, what was federal land. So that formed kind of the basis for an evaluation and we felt like we needed tiers of evaluations, we needed one that was like Joint Venture wide where we could see gross changes on the landscape and the conservation reserve program that came in just before that, as well, it’s one of those things that we could see at that landscape level but became very important. We also felt like then we needed…finer, scale evaluation tools, being some of these pair counts and bird counts and other kinds of 38
surveys but then kind of project by project evaluations, we take a smaller area of land, we decide on some prescriptions to do habitat restoration, different treatments, fire, maybe grazing uh but we needed to go in there and say, up front, what we expected the benefits would be of our land management and then be able to, on a project level basis, to actually say whether it worked or not, so if it worked we could repeat it, if it didn’t work we could try to fine tune it and do something else. I was fortunate enough, I don’t know if anybody else has had this…fortune that I did, I was at one time on four different technical committees. The first technical committees were the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, the Rain Water Basin Joint Venture in Nebraska, the (?) Lakes Joint Venture in Texas and I was the first U.S. representative on the Arctic Goose Joint Venture technical committee. And it you look at that geographical, all of those Joint Ventures dealt with the same resources and different times of the year and…in the two countries. And…we tried…my role was to try and relate, from Joint Venture to Joint Venture, some of the successes and failures and monitoring and evaluation and remind them that they were taking care of the same birds up and down the flyways.
DS: Okay, I like to shift gears just a little bit and Bob and (unclear of name) let me go back you for a question. And now we have this thing that’s out there, it went from a very early implementation stage, we’re tracking acres and we’re counting ducks and we’re looking at linkages out there, things are beginning to move, we have partners that are looking; how do we communicate with this cad way of people? And when I was in Minneapolis, we were working with a lady by the name of Katherine Holmeman, later Bill McDougle in Washington was working with it, I know the Canadian…I know Jim you’ll have some thoughts here, but how were we dealing with the communication, Bob, with all these many partners that were out there in the Joint Ventures nationally and at the local level and we had some communication challenges but what was happening there to address that problem with communicating with all these many partners?
BS: Early on there was a paper or a brochure, if you will, publication we put out called Waterfowl 2000 and that was the intial document across Canada, the U.S. to try to explain to the partners in the plan what was going on, it was not oriented towards outside general purpose, public. There had been a slide show put together, a very good slide show, a brochure about the North American Plan that was being used by the public. Then 39
each Joint Venture started developing their own communications plans, which brought it down to the local level too. And so, again, it was a partnership type of thing, the International Association of Fish and Wildlife writers, Outdoor Writers Association, they took on the North American as kind of a project, if you will, and they were writing articles in many of the different outlets. Each state made a commitment that their internal, their document, their like Colorado Outdoors or New York Conservationist; they would produce articles about the North American Plan. So it was, again, a multi-facetted approach that all the partners decided to do. You looked at Ducks Unlimited magazines, Ducks Unlimited magazine had an article, every magazine, something about the North American Plan or what it was doing and editorials in there about the North American Plan. The Awards Program that was established for international award or state award or local awards, that was a way for partners to be recognized for their good work and then that was published in newspapers etcetera, etcetera. There were presentations made at national meetings, papers published by various of us that were authors about the North American Plan and its accomplishments and then the accomplishments reports that came in, trying to put back to the Congress how many acres were being put together in Mexico, Canada, the U.S. (unclear) that we’re being acquired, managed, enhanced, etcetera; wetland acres that were being restored, it just became pervasive and any other organizations help with that.
DS: And no longer was the best kept secret and we didn’t want it to be. The public was well aware of what we were doing, they were well aware of the plait of waterfowl and what was being done to address that and we’re I’m going with this, we began to set the stage for the work on getting a more stronger funding commitment to get a lot of the habitat work done on the ground. And so in the period, and I don’t know exactly when it all started, the idea came about that we had to have a more secure, long-term funding capability for some of these North American Projects and Bob I don’t know exactly where to start this history because it’s right in the period that we’re talking about. But could you talk a little bit about the early days of trying to get an idea across through Congress, a funding mechanism for the North American, the Mitchell Bills it was called in the early days and later the North American Wetland Conservation Act, but could you kind of set the stage for us as we came into that part of our history? 40
BS: Okay, and this is kind of like a set of blind men describing the elephant in a way and we can maybe give a framework for it but there are many other people that were involved in this that I don’t know about, Harvey might know about some etcetera. But basically it started with the First Step Program, the monies that were the states, like Ken put forward $100,000 and that was matched by some other states, so all of a sudden we had a million dollars.
KR: California…
BS: California put mon...and Colorado, etcetera; so we had a million dollars from the states. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation was willing to match that, DU was going to match in there, so pretty soon we had four million dollars that had come up be, to go to Canada but there had to a mechanism to get it there. Part of this mechanism, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation had to have its charter change by active legislator to allow it to become international and there was a Senator Caston, I believe Rollie mentioned earlier, came up with some source of money that would go to the foundation that would be the federal match. The second year Senator Mitchell put in the appropriations act for some of the land and water conservation monies, two million to go into the second step where the states brought in money; DU again was going to match it, the foundation was able to move it across the borders. And during this time, there were many, there were several staffers from different from different members offices in both the Senate and the House that were discussing something more long term and what, and I don’t have all the details in it, but the culmination of it was Bob Davison and Senator Mitchell’s staff, eventually, with other partners in Congress, got an act passed that’s called The North American Wetlands Conservation Act, December, signed December 13 of 1989 that authorized up to 15 million dollars a year to go to the North American Wetlands Conservation Act Program, which the organization on the ground this far were are Joint Ventures under the North American Plan; although it wasn’t limited to those, those were the people who were ready to receive this kind of money. Then you have the appropriations process, Senator Stevens and his staff with some very strong support from, from Ducks Unlimited, were able to put money in the very first appropriation bill, I think was fiscal year starting in fall of 1990. I think there was about seven million in that fiscal year and they next year it increased and it just grew and right now that act is up to, I think 41
$40 million has been appropriated by Congress for the North American Wetlands Conservation Act.
DS: In your view Bob, how important was that legislation, those dollars to getting this to where we’re at today with the North American and maybe even with what the future looks like? How important was that and everything that we’re doing as we put this building blocks together?
BS: Well dollar wise, there probably wasn’t any other single act that was any more important than that. But the work that had been done in Canada and the U.S. from 1987 on in developing these Joint Ventures and detailing the projects on the ground and building these partnerships, who then applied for act dollars; you can’t discount the impact of the North American Plan and its partners putting it together. Um the act has gone beyond the North American Plan, doesn’t, hasn’t left the plan but its…wetlands conservation for many different species. It’s still a major funding source for North American Plan partners but…I think it was equal importance to any other single action that occurred and it’s certainly the most important funding mechanism but, again, it’s built on the shoulders of many giants in terms of getting it implemented.
JM: To go back to the beginning of the Wetlands Conservation Act, Canada throughout the process of developing the North American Plan had to be very careful about the fact that the…we were two sovereign nations and it was an issue that we had to be fairly careful about at the same time as working closely and when it came time to do the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, Canada was obviously was very supportive of the process but was very sensitive about how it could support that. And we managed through people like Jim Patterson and others to meet with congressional staffers along with our U.S. counterparts and to convey to them…Canada’s support and preparation and readiness to take on these kinds of responsibilities and roles that came, came with that. And at one point, Canada was asked to testified in front before a Senate Committee and Jim Patterson was going to do that but we were banned from doing so by our Embassy because we couldn’t take an oath before a foreign power; and that’s how sensitive this got to be and Jim went ahead, he didn’t take the oath, they adjoined and then they talked to him. But that cost Jim something because we needed to express how much we supported that and there were other occasions where I had opportunities to speak with 42
staffers, both on the administration side and the Congressional side, and express Canada’s support for what was happening here and I don’t think that… anything has topped the North American Act in terms of being able to implement the North American Plan in Canada; and it certainly put paid to all those concerns that never a dime would flow across the border. I still tell people at parties that you know there’s still you know $40 million a year across the border from the United States and they still can’t believe it. And so its significance was absolutely essential and if it didn’t exist we’d have to find something else and so you know the support of Congress was key and that then brought on states.
KR: As I recall there was a stimulus for a lot of Joint Venture, new Joint Venture proposals (people laughing) and so one of the issues (unclear, still laughing) became trying to maintain the focus on Canada and the prairie habitats.
JC: Everybody wanted a piece of it.
KR: Yea, it was real of a sudden.
JM: Well at the same time, then, not only were the new Joint Ventures being proposed in the United States but that’s when the Pacific Coast Joint Venture came about in 1990 and 1991 and this kind of time frame, we got the first truly international Joint Venture working across borders where as a single Joint Venture from the northern part of British Columbia to just north of San Francisco, worked together as a unit and it was a wonderful symbol of how far we had come in terms of partnerships to be able to actually work a single Joint Venture across boundary.
BS: I like to go back and mention the Implementation Board again. It served as a, for a lack of a better term, a lobbying group although they were an education groups, since they weren’t all lobbyist. But the Implementation Board members and their staff played real key roles in helping design the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and get it passed through and encouraged a lot of members of Congress to support, it had overwhelming support when it was passed and that was done to, partners in the private sector and probably need to have, sometime, have another session just with, maybe, with some of these partners that were involved with the North American Act and get their recollections and the behind the scenes stories recorded too. 43
*JC or JM: If you want to put paid to this whole North American Wetlands Conservation Act aspect, President Bush Senior, made a speech supporting that and a few months later we able in Canada to have the Prime Minister of Canada to make a speech in support of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And so on one end the plan deals with land owners and individuals and local communities and states and providences and national governments and departments and agencies but it also deals with Presidents and Prime Ministers; talk about covering the range.
HN: You know Bob’s reference to the different partners that were involved in the Implementation Board, for example, but I recall one of the key benefits that came out of that very early on was that the representative from the National Association of Soil Conservation Districts, they were present and (unclear) became a strong believer in the North American and it did wonders…the Department of Agriculture.
BS: I like to follow up on that one, at the same time all this other things were occurring, we have other agencies in the U.S., in the federal government the U.S. that perhaps in Canada too, Jim can talk…
JM: the FRA.
BS: things dealing with policy and other organizations, that’s what Harvey was talking about in the Department of Agriculture, we’ve had the Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, they wanted to not get our money but they wanted to piggy back and support the North American Plan. They developed a program called Taking Wing, which they got funded with the help of the Implementation Board lobbying to Congress, they got it funded for about $1.2 million in their first year; Taking Wing is still ongoing, it’s to enhance, restore, promote wetlands on national forest lands. The Bureau of Land, Bureau of Indian Affairs, early on when we were still in Minneapolis, came to us and they developed a program with our support and encouragement called Circle of Flight, where on various Indian reservations they were trying to protect and enhance and restore wetlands.
HN: Still doing it.
BS: Bureau of Land Management has a program that they originally called Wetlands 2000, which is evolved into some other things and they receive money, lobbied for them to receive money from Congress to do work on BLM lands to promote wetland 44
conservation for wetlands, waterfowl. There were many other organizations uh USDA, we had were able to swamp buster, piggy back on swamp buster on a…
[Someone saying sod buster]
BS: CRP and on the FMHA taking back lands Fish and Wildlife Service being able to put easements on those lands to protect wetlands before they were sold back to other farmers. And it just…other agencies in the federal government piggy backed on this in the U.S. and I know Canada, Jim you had some things like that.
JM: Yea we had very much similar working with agriculture department, Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, Ag. Regional groups associated with the Pacific Coast Joint Venture and not only did you have government departments and agencies but you also had providences doing things like passing legislation for permanent easements. In the Canadian law, an easement could terminate on the sale of a property and you needed special legislation passed in various places in order that an easement, a conservation easement or any other kind of easement, could be made permanent so that you don’t end up losing all that you’ve invested in and so providences went out of their way to change their legislation in order for things like that to happen. We also put into place, at the federal government, tax benefits; in our Canadian tax forms there’s a… the last line is ecological gifts and it’s there now and it means that if you are farmer Brown and you give your back 40 to Ducks Unlimited or The Nature Conservancy and its high ecological value, you could use that as a tax deduction for the rest of your life. And it’s completely different than the way it use be treated and last I heard from Clayton Ruebeck, who ran that program, we’ve done $100 million worth of land protection under that kind of rubric. And it’s just an outstanding development and it came from the kind of work that was done by the Canadian North American Wetlands Conservation Council as well as the North American Plan Committee in Canada that realized that there was one dimension that we had to work on, the legal side of the question.
HN: I just have a couple other thoughts, Dave, at some point I hope that we’re able to identify a lot of the people that you know worked on this and uh, in the background and we’ve talked about that before. But there were some key players and at some point we outta be able to recognize or at least go on a list of contributors or supporters. For example, you know one of the strongest persons that we had in Washington D.C. during 45
the evolution of the North American Plan was Jim Range; former Congressional staffer, you all know Jim and uh just an example of a person, we don’t talk about that much. And it’s too bad that Red Hunt isn’t on this panel because from California Red, of course, was on of the strong supporters of the Plan and has worked with it continuously right through to this date, even after retirement and they were the first state to contribute a half of million dollars from their duck stamp fund. And you can say the same for a number of other states, so some of those things go…
KR: Gary Myers.
HN: Gary Myers spent a lifetime on it.
JC: One of the things that Jim alluded to this earlier and I think it fits in with some of this recent discussion but it’s just the, beyond waterfowl and wetlands, just the way of doing business that the North American Plan brought to all of our, all of our jobs; Dave you as a Central Flyway representative and myself as a Regional Migratory Bird Chief, we spend still a lot of time on setting regulations. Back before the North American Plan, that was most of the time we spent with our state partners, was in that kind of situation and it wasn’t always very friendly. They often wanted different objectives than we did and we had some pretty heated discussions about things. Then these Joint Ventures started within these Flyways and we sat down at the table with them and we found out that we had a lot more in common with those state partners and with our other federal partners, the Forest Service, BLM uh you know National Park Service…
[Someone saying “USDA”]
JC: USDA. And it has made it our whole jobs, I think, more pleasant and more productive because we found ways of looking for common goals and overlap in objectives and it’s kind of deemphasized in a way, the fighting and the differences and I think that’s allowed us to make a lot of accomplishments that I don’t think we would have learned that without something like this new way of approaching conservation.
HN: And I hope whatever you do with these sessions and whatever comes out of them, that at some point it’s possible to give a current state of events. You know, one of the accomplishments right now and the program is still going strong and the accomplishments are beyond anybody’s imagination when we started. 46
DS: It was a dream and it was a vision, it was a plan and when you really think back on it, it was whole evolution in terms of what we’re doing. John I think that you said it the best, it changed the way that we did national resource management in North American. But fellows we have ended the part of this panel, where we wanted to get so we, you’ve done well, thank you. You brought us up to the act and putting it into place and the next major phase will be to think about Joint Ventures and the actual implementation on the ground of the North American. We’re look at our accomplishments as Harvey said and continue to work on that list of all the people that were, that had a role in this North American. Thank You. 47